Quotes About Innocence

Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.

Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going a long time back. I said nothing. I am one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.

Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.

Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them?

Who has more pockets than a magician? A boy. Whose pockets contain *more* than a magicians? A boy's.

I was only twelve. But I knew how much I loved her. It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that was no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long Autumn days of the years past when I carried her books home from school.

Why then you're as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust 'reality' and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings.

Her cheeks glowed with pink charcoals.

The girl who had known the weather and never been burnt by fireflies, the girl who had known what dandelions meant rubbed off on your chin. Then, she would be gone.

Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then. Now, it's too late.

Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with toy guns.

Who said childhood was the best time of life? When in reality it was the most terrible, the most merciless era, the barbaric time when there were no police to protect you, only parents preoccupied with themselves and their taller world.

Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to thèguilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.

Have you ever heard of rubbing dandelions under your chin? If it rubs off that means you're in love.

Will walked silently to touch the iron rungs hidden under the rustling ivy. "Dad. You won't pull these off …?" Dad probed one with his fingers. "Some day, when you're tired of them, you'll take them off yourself." "I'll never be tired of them." "Is that how it seems? Yes, to someone your age, you figure you'll never get tired of anything. All right, son, up you go.

And Will? Why, he's the last peach, high on a summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them?

Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood. I

Women never wake then, do they? They sleep the sleep of babes and children.

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

Pipkin: an assemblage of speeds, smells, textures. A cross section of all the boys who ever ran, fell, got up, and ran again.

We got caught reading nights with flashlights under our sheets, right? So, nobody'll suspect an old jar of fireflies; folks'll think it's just a night museum.

I ask you, doctor, what is there in the world more selfish than a baby? Nothing! -The Small Assassin

How strange the popsicle, the vanilla night, the night of close-packed ice cream, of mosquito-lotioned wrists, the night of running children suddenly veered from their games and put away behind glass, behind wood, the popsicles in melting puddles of lime and strawberry where they fell when the children were scooped indoors.

It became a game that I took to with immense gusto: to see how much I could remember about dandelions themselves, or picking wild grapes with my father and brother, rediscovering the mosquito-breeding ground rain barrel by the side bay window, or searching out the smell of the gold-fuzzed bees that hung around our back porch grape arbor. Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.