Quotes About Innocence

Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!

I remember my own childhood vividly..I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them. (In conversation with Art Spiegelman, The New Yorker, September 27, 1993)

Childhood is a tricky business. Usually something goes wrong.

I refuse to lie to children. I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.

If I have an unusual gift, it's not that I draw particularly better than other people — I've never fooled myself about that. Rather it's that I remember things other people don't recall: the sounds and feelings and images — the emotional quality — of particular moments in childhood. Happily an essential part of myself — my dreaming life — still lives in the light of childhood.

Where the Wild Things Are was not meant to please everybody – only children. A letter from a seven-year-old boy encourages me to think that I have reached children as I had hoped. He wrote: 'How much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive my sister and I want to spend the summer there. Please answer soon.' I did not answer that question, for I have no doubt that sooner or later they will find their way, free of charge.

The children were small and still belonged to them.

challenging readers to watch these old movies "with the eyes of a six-year-old child, eyes that flick constantly from the terror on the screen to the dark, rustling trees outside the window.

It's comforting to see children again, I mean those who were born after the war, real children who know nothing but a world that includes the living dead. They know not to play near water, not to go out alone or after dark in the spring or summer. They don't know to be afraid, and that is the greatest gift, the only gift we can leave to them.

Just as a happy child cannot mis-hug, the sincere heart cannot mis-pray.

What child, whilst summer is happening, bothers to think that summer will end? What child when snow is on the ground stops to remember that not long ago the ground was snowless?

Relationships don't thrive because the guilty are punished but because the innocent are merciful.

I never met a teddy I didn't like.

Probably all babies, having recently been nothing, have a tenuous hold on life.

I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

Childhood's logic never asks to be proved (all conclusions are absolute).

The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can't. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot.

Laughter so easily turns to hysteria for imaginative children.

The Black child must learn early to allow laughter to fill his mouth or the million small cruelties he encounters will congeal and clog his throat.

I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.

We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.

And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again.