How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The truth of it was that Charles was abysmally timid of girls. And, like most shy men, he satisfied his normal needs in the anonymity of the prostitute. There is great safety for a shy man in a whore. Having been paid for, and in advance, she has become a commodity, and a shy man can be gay with her and even brutal with her. Also, there is none of the horror of the possible turndown which shrivels the guts of timid men. (6.1.1)
Translation: Charles is not a ladies man. You know how he has some issues with his dad when it comes to rejection? It's not terribly surprising that he fears the same kind of rejection from the women-folk. But this is also a convenient excuse for the narrator to introduce the subject of prostitutes into the narrative, because they are pretty much going to be a running theme.
Quote #2
Cathy learned when she was very young that sexuality with all its attendant yearnings and pains, jealousies and taboos, is the most disturbing impulse humans have. And in that day it was even more disturbing than it is now, because the subject was unmentionable and unmentioned. Everyone concealed that little hell in himself, while publicly pretending it did not exist—and when he was caught up in it he was completely helpless. (8.1.18)
What does it mean that sex is disturbing? The narrator seems to be implying that people don't really know how to deal with these weird feelings within themselves. Society doesn't help out either, and actually makes it worse by denying the role sex plays in everyone's lives. But Cathy, being the smarty-pants she is, realizes that this makes sex a really great way to control people, because they will at once act on it and feel ashamed about acting on it. Way to help an evil whore out, society.
Quote #3
The sex play of children has always gone on. Everyone, I guess, who is not abnormal has foregathered with little girls in some dim leafy place, in the bottom of a manger, under a willow, in a culvert under a road—or at least has dreamed of doing so. Nearly all parents are faced with the problem sooner or later, and then the child is lucky if the parent remembers his own childhood. In the time of Cathy's childhood, however, it was harder. The parents, denying it in themselves, were horrified to find it in their children. (8.1.21)
Wondering what the heck Steinbeck means by the sex play of children? Basically, he's talking about kids sexually experimenting with one another and saying that pretty much all kids do it at some point. A picture of a super sexually-repressed society emerges as the narrator traces these children to their parents, noting their parents' inability to deal with this totally normal experimentation due to having repressed their own sexuality.