How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
After this Sunday Elisha and Ella Mae no longer met each other each day after school, no longer spent Saturday afternoons wandering through Central Park, or lying on the beach. All that was over for them. If they came together again it would be in wedlock. They would have children and raise them in the church. (1.1.21)
Elisha and Ella Mae are young kids who do fun, teenaged things like go to the park or the beach. The potential for sexual contact is, we gotta admit, pretty high, and their meetings are quickly put to an end. Sex is not supposed to be related to recreation, according to Father James; it should be part of marriage, children, and the church.
Quote #5
He had sinned. In spite of the saints, his mother and his father, the warnings he had heard from his earliest beginnings, he had sinned with his hands a sin that was hard to forgive. In the school lavatory, alone, thinking of the boys, older, bigger, braver, who made bets with each other as to whose urine could arch higher, he had watched in himself a transformation of which he would never dare to speak. (1.1.26)
Okay, folks, get ready for some embarrassing moments. John is talking about masturbation. He thinks that his "alone time" is sinful, and it's not clear if it would be bad in general, or if it's especially bad because while he masturbates he thinks of the older boys… a desire that is doubly forbidden to him.
Quote #6
When men looked at Deborah they saw no further than her unlovely and violated body. (2.1.25)
Deborah is the victim of rape, and unfortunately, after this traumatic experience, she must constantly relive it because everyone in the community has reduced her to that moment. For her, sex is violent and ugly, because that is the only sexual experience or attention she has ever received.