Quotes About Innocence

She held out her hand and we sat there together like grade-school kids on a field trip. "Line up in twos and no talking." Life itself is a peculiar outing. Sometimes I still feel like I need a note from my mother.

The tricky part of any lie is trying to figure out how you'd behave if you were innocent.

Ordinarily, an alibi is an account of suspect's whereabouts at the time a crime was committed and it's offered up as proof of innocence, but here it didn't matter where anyone was.

The dead are mute, but the living still have voice with which to protest their innocence. Often their objections are noisy and pious, impossible to refute since the person who could condemn them has been silenced forever.

Dylan Thomas, 'Fern Hill

It's my earliest memory: arranging my brother's marbles into words. It is summer, and I am beneath the oak that stands in the back corner of the work yard. Thomas, ten, whom I love above all the others, has taught me nine words: SARAH, GIRL, BOY, GO, STOP, JUMP, RUN, UP, DOWN. He has written them on a parchment and given me a pouch of forty-eight glass marbles with which to spell them out, enough to shape two words at a time.

the stethoscope in little David's ears. "Can you hear that?" I asked. "What do you suppose that is?" He frowned for a moment as if he were lost in the wonder of the strange tapping in his chest. Then he broke out in a grin and startled me by saying, "Is that Jesus knocking?

Up till I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness.

these lovely, lying children, I saw very clearly that there was no redemption here.

Remember, childhood only lasts 10-12 years. There's a lot that has to be squeezed in to make for a lifetime of happy memories. ?

Children have a right to be children. They have a right to spend their early years being playful, spontaneous, and irresponsible.

I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence once lost, is lost forever.

I do not believe I have ever again slept so well as I did that night in the inn at Crythin Gifford. For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

Small children will talk to anyone, once the guard of shyness has fallen, and they have, like the elderly, a sense of immediacy, a need to say or do something, now, now, the minute it is thought of, combined with that other sense, of the complete irrelevance of time.

Yet there was something about Phoebe Kitzke. An innocence, maybe. No, that wasn't right. It was how she seemed trusting. More fool her. Or maybe him.

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.

That being said, one person's "barbarian" is another person's "just doing what everybody else is doing." (How many can be expected to do better than that?) The question is, Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, Whom do we believe we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no less innocent than the young African-American men (and a few women) who were butchered and hanged from trees in small-town America.

So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.

Ninguno de nosotros podrá recuperar jamás aquella inocencia anterior a toda teoría, cuando el arte no se veía obligado a justificarse

Did you know a child laughs an average of three hundred times a day, and an adult just three?

think about kissing boys all the time. Me and all my friends. We even practice making out with our pillows.

In place of the youngster he'd once been was an angry, cynical young man made dangerous by the fact that he had nothing more to lose. In destroying an innocent boy, the Germans had unwittingly created their own worst enemy.

When she was a girl, Natalie used to start each day by skipping through the shop, calling good morning to her favorites as she passed them---Angelina Ballerina, Charlotte and Ramona, Lilly and her purple plastic purse.

For the rest of the night he sat by himself under the elm-tree. Until this moment it had never seemed to him that his magicianship set him apart from other men. But now he had glimpsed the wrong side of something. He had the eeriest feeling - as if the world were growing older around him, and the best part of existence - laughter, love and innocence - were slipping irrevocably into the past.