Quote 10
"Then why on earth didn't you say so?" she cried, and so intense was her exasperation that she drove her sharp nails into the skin of his wrist. "Instead of drivelling away about knots and vacuum cleaners and lions, and making me miserable for weeks and weeks." (13.66)
This is a key moment in the sex-violence connection in Brave New World. Lenina, in her passion for John, hurts him physically—a lot like the scene at the end of the novel. Check out "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory" for more.
Quote 11
"You don't say so," said Lenina politely, not knowing in the least what the Warden had said, but taking her cue from his dramatic pause. When the Warden started booming, she had inconspicuously swallowed half a gramme of soma, with the result that she could now sit, serenely not listening, thinking of nothing at all, but with her large blue eyes fixed on the Warden's face in an expression of rapt attention. (6.3.19)
Incessant and unquestioning soma use seems to be a quality common to the female characters in Brave New World. For this and other reasons, there are a fair number of scholars who label the work misogynistic.
Quote 12
Lenina shook her head. "Was and will make me ill," she quoted, "I take a gramme and only am."
In the end she persuaded him to swallow four tablets of soma. Five minutes later roots and fruits were abolished; the flower of the present rosily blossomed. A message from the porter announced that, at the Warden's orders, a Reservation Guard had come round with a plane and was waiting on the roof of the hotel. They went up at once. An octoroon in Gamma-green uniform saluted and proceeded to recite the morning's programme. (6.3.38-9)
With the news of his deportation, Bernard is given the chance he always wanted—to feel threatened, to feel angry, to feel something. It is one of the great tragedies of his character that he chooses to block this moment out with soma.