Quotes About Innocence

I cry for a little girl's dreams. I cry because the dreams will not die, though I am powerless to make them come true.

Little girls are twice as precious and innocent as little boys. I do not know a culture that does not make them that way.

The alien pounding and the heat and the dark glistening bodies dragged her back, back past the cold ashes of her innocence to a time when pain could be castrated on the sharp edges of iron-studded faith.

That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

I have never planned anything illegal in my life,' Aunt Augusta said. 'How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?

They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about . . .

It isn't. when you come to think of it a quite respectable trade, the detection of the innocent, for aren't lovers nearly always innocent? They have committed no crime, they are certain in their own minds that they have done no wrong, 'as long as no one but myself is hurt', the old tag is ready on their lips, and love, of course, excuses everything -- so they believe and so I used to believe in the days when I loved.

Childhood is the writer's bank balance.

He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it

It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin--only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it.

for aren't lovers nearly always innocent? They have committed no crime, they are certain in their own minds that they have done no wrong, 'as long as no one but myself is hurt', the old tag is ready on their lips, and love, of course, excuses everything—so they believe, and so I used to believe in the days when I loved.

What's the good? he'll always be innocent, you can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.

They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him.

They killed him because he was too innocent to live.

Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men

There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love it when on finds it.

I have never planned anything illegal in my life,' Aunt Augusta said. 'How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?

Innocence always calls mutely or protection when we would be so much wise to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

have never planned anything illegal in my life,' Aunt Augusta said. 'How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?

You can have a hundred women and still be a virgin, Pyle. Most of your G.I.s who were hanged for rape in the war were virgins. We don't have so many in Europe. I'm glad. They do a lot of harm.

There is always that one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. ...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.