Quotes About Innocence

In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven what is has always been: in that way children inhabit the realm of myth.

How young they are, how frisky! I thought. How touchingly innocent! Was I ever like that? I could not remember.

His mother said that all children were arsonists at heart, and if not for the lighter he'd have used matches.

She was small-boned and exquisite, and naked like the rest of them, with nothing on her but a garland of flowers and a pink hair ribbon, frequent props on the sex-kiddie sites.

Around the age of seven I wrote a play. The protagonist was a giant; the theme was crime and punishment; the crime was lying, as befits a future novelist; the punishment was being squashed to death by the moon.  ...This play was not a raging success. As I recall, my brother and his pals came in and laughed at it, thus giving me an early experience of literary criticism.

Opening up their sack, the children chorus, "Oh Snowman, what have we found?" They lift out the objects, hold them up as if offering them for sale: a hubcap, a piano key, a chunk of pale-green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean. A plastic BlyssPluss container, empty; a ChickieNobs Bucket O'Nubbins, ditto. A computer mouse, or the busted remains of one, with a long wiry tail.

Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they'd stagger and lurch and topple over the verge—The verge of what? we wondered.

Is this purgatory, and if it is, why is it so much like the first grade?

He smiles most of the time and has eyes that the naive might think of as candid.

Maybe that was the real Bernice, I thought - kind and innocent. Maybe she was truly like that inside, and all the fighting we used to do and all her sharp and unpleasant edges - that was her way of struggling to get out of the hard skin she'd grown all over herself like a beetle shell. But no matter how she hit out and raged, she'd been stuck in there. That thought made me feel so sorry for her that I cried.

Young girls have such sweet tooths. Or is that sweet teeth?

Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they'd stagger and lurch and topple over the verge - The verge of what? we wondered. Was it like a cliff? - and go plunging down in the flames, like snowballs made of burning sulphur hurled by the angry hand of God.

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

After a certain point, the ravages of experience reverse themselves; we put on innocence with advancing age, at least in the minds of others.

They never knew, about that or why I left. Their own innocence, the reason I couldn't tell them; perilous innocence, closing them in glass, their articial garden, greenhouse. They didn't teach us about evil, they didn't understand about it, how could I describe it to them? They were from another age, prehistoric, when everyone got married and had a family, children growing in the yard like sunowers; remote as Eskimoes or mastodons.

I didn't want realism anyway: I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents. They want a postcard.

Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they'd stagger and lurch and topple over the verge—The verge of what? we wondered. Was it like a cliff?—and go plunging down in flames, like snowballs made of burning sulphur hurled by the angry hand of God.

Oh, torture. Is this purgatory, and if it is, why is it so much like the first grade?

we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust

The books I was given to learn from were about a boy and a girl called Dick and Jane. The books were very old, and the pictures had been altered at Ardua Hall. Jane wore long skirts and sleeves, but you could tell from the places where the paint had been applied that her skirt had once been above her knees and her sleeves had ended above her elbows. Her hair had once been uncovered.

We want the sharers of our youth to remain forever young, to remind us of what we were, not of what we are.

Oh, and last week? I changed into a tiger and scared Tommy Bertram so bad he wet his pants. Wait'll he sees my dragon.

Oh, Scarlett, you are so young you wring my heart.

Influence is everything, and guilt or innocence merely an academic question.