Quotes About Innocence

She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose white scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze; a girl as bewitching, and clever, as any girl who ever lived.

though some of those casual remarks and private jokes assumed a horrific significance much later. Towards the end of that term, for instance, Bunny had a maddening habit of breaking out into choruses of "The Farmer in the Dell"; I found it merely annoying and could not understand the violent agitation to which it provoked the rest of them: not knowing then, as I do now, that it must have chilled them all to the bone.

It was an obscure specialization, but the candlelit and treacherous universe in which they moved - of sin unpunished, of innocence destroyed - was one I found appealing. Even the titles of their plays were strangely seductive, trapdoors to something beautiful and wicked that trickled beneath the surface of mortality: The Malcontent. The White Devil. The Broken Heart.

throw up his hands and say, 'Who, me? I had nothing to do with it.'

We Chroniclers do well to be afraid when we approach those parts of our histories (our natures) that deal with evil, the depraved, the benighted. Describing, we become. We even - and I've see it and have shuddered - summon. The most innocent of poets can write of ugliness and forces he has done no more than speculate about - and bring them into his life. I tell you, I've seen it, watched it...

Sometimes when I, Anna, look back, I want to laugh out loud. It is the appalled, envious laughter of knowledge at innocence. I would be incapable now of such trust. I, Anna, would never begin an affair with Paul. Or Michael. Or rather, I would begin an affair, just that, knowing exactly what would happen; I would begin a deliberately barren, limited relationship. What Ella lost during those five years was the power to create through naivety.

Martha's heart was beating wildly for several reasons. No one had ever tried to put his hand up her skirt before, and she was petrified at the wild driving. She looked confused and alarmed; and the old Scotsman decided to see her as the little girl he had known for years. He took a ten-shilling note from his stuffed wallet, and gave it to her. 'For when you go back to school,' he said bluffly.

It is so hard to be a girl and want what you have never had. To be a child and want what you cannot imagine. To look at women and think, Nobody else, nobody else has ever wanted to do what I want to do. Hard to be innocent, believing yourself evil. Hard to think no one else in the history of the world wants to do this. Hard to find out that they do, but not with you. Or not in quite the way you want them to do it.

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

She got in, as she had persuaded Jerott Blyth to bring her half across France, by force of logic, a kind of flat-chested innocence and the doggedness of a flower-pecker attacking a strangling fig.

Happiness, that most childish of states, is infectious. Furthermore, in its innocence, it will not be hidden, even when tempered with sorrow

If I were yourself, I would perhaps give him his head. He looks a meek enough child." "So did Heliogabalus at an early age," said Lymond. "And Attila and Torquemada and Nero and the man who invented the boot. The only thing they had in common was a cherubic adolescence. And red hair, of course, makes it worse.

The nursing brethren spoke in whispers to Jerott. Such stillness was what the overstrained body required. Pray God it would last. Downstairs, Jerott unleashed his anxious irritation on Marthe. 'They know it can't last. Why don't they admit it?' 'They are kind. They are innocent. They believe God is merciful,' said Marthe.

He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed -- a kind of amiable absurdity.

It's not the innocent young things that need gentle handling--it's the ones that have been frightened and hurt.

What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child? demanded Miss Haydock. Well, Eve -- it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva.

Ah! childhood! You're living the happiest days of your life, young man. You won't believe me, but you are.

Detective-story writers are obliged by their disagreeable profession to invent startling and unpleasant incidents and people, and are (I presume) at liberty to imagine what might happen if such incidents and people were to intrude upon the life of an innocent and well-ordered community;

Tommy and his little playmates don't regard being young as just one of those things that are likely to happen to anybody. They make a business of it. And

The powerful Western image of childhood innocence does not seem to benefit Black children. Black children are born guilty.

Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.

The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, thought you know that it probably will not be.

Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.

But - but - but! said Dirk, thumping the table in frustration, don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.