Quotes About Innocence

How she wanted to put away adult things and go back to seeing through a looking-glass, darkly.

So young, he knew nothing about aerodynamics, except how the heart could lift and lift.

And, once the innocence of childhood is lost, no adolescent has ever regained it.

She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn't smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It's something else. Maybe relief at having confirmed through personal experience the long-held suspicion of our species, that the enchanted world of childhood is merely a mask for something else, a more subtle and paradoxical magic. - p. 157

Another word for poverty of choice is innocence.

A willingness to be pleased requires modesty and even innocence--easy to deride as mawkish and sentimental.

In disasters, children show us the way to laughter. They are our special treasures.

Rien ne vaut les souvenirs et les illusions de l'adolescence.

Sur la fosse, entre les sapins, un enfant pleurait agenouillé, et sa poitrine, brisée par les sanglots, haletait dans l'ombre, sous la pression d'un regret immense plus doux que la lune et plus insondable que la nuit.

Înc? de mic? o cuprinsese una din acele iubiri de copil care au în acelaÈ™i timp puritatea unei religii È™i violenÈ›a unei necesit??i./ Toute petite, elle s'était prise d'un de ces amours d'enfant qui ont à la fois la pureté d'une religion et la violence d'un besoin. (©BeQ)

Clown. A été disloqué dès l'enfance.

His pleasures, like boys playing in a school yard, had so thoroughly trampled on his heart that nothing green would grow there.

Maybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world.

Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

Calm, lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.

For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.

Children should live a wholesome and natural life and go about with a mussel in one corner of their mouths and a shrimp in the other instead of sweets.

Children, who have yet to learn our ways, are notoriously promiscuous in their affection. They'll sit on anyone's knee.

However angry I was with him, however much I wanted to humiliate Terry, I suddenly saw such humanity in his eyes, and in the way he tried to smile - such innocence in the way he wanted to understand me, and such possibility of pain, along with the implicit assumption that he wouldn't be harmed - that I pulled away.

One day we are children, our faces are bright and open. We want to know how machines work. We are in love with polar bears. The next day we're throwing ourselves down the stairs, drunk and weeping. Our lives are over. We hate life and we hate death.

Old age is the new childhood.

the innocent have everything—integrity, respect, moral goodness—except pleasure. Pleasure: vortex and abyss—that which we desire and fear simultaneously. Pleasure implies dirtying your hands and mind, and being threatened; there is fear, disgust, self-loathing and moral failure. Pleasure was hard work; not everyone, perhaps not most people, could bear to find it.

A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor.