Quotes About Innocence

Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkle from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then. Yet

I like reading and all that, but a crave to get back to the life of my infancy and all its freedom. (Sue Bridehead)

A cloud that has gathered over us; though 'we have wronged no man, corrupted no man, defrauded no man!' Though perhaps we have 'done that which was right in our own eyes.

There's more for us to think about in that one little hungry heart than in all the stars of the sky…

She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.

Why do you... keep tantalizing me? I tell you, Tess, I'd take you for a flirt, For a sit you could catch, If I didn't know just honest and pure you are.

Her love was entire as a child's, and though warm as summer it was as fresh as spring.

Tess Durberyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience

Tess Durbeyfield, in quell'epoca della sua vita, era solo un recipiente di emozioni non ancora colorite dall'esperienza

Han dejado ya de llorar los corderos, Clarice?

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

Nun, Neffe, was man da heut von dir hörte, darin hast du dich nicht zum ersten Male geübt.‹ ›Wie meinst du, Onkel Niko?‹ ›Wende nicht Unschuld vor! Du musizierst ja.‹ ›Was für ein Ausdruck!‹ ›Der hat schon für Dümmeres herhalten müssen [...].‹

How good, he thinks, that she breathes in oblivion with every breath she draws! That in childhood each night is a deep wide gulf between one day and the next.

What we venerate in the Saints, beyond and above all that we know is this secret; the mystery of an innocence and of an identity perfectly hidden in God.

Songs of Innocence

It is in the nature of things to be drawn to the very experiences that will spoil our innocence, transform our lives, and give us necessary complexity and depth.

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.

Proverbs for Paranoids: 1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures. 2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. 3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. 4. You hide, they seek. 5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love

The smartest kid Justin ever met, back in kindergarten, had told him to pretend his parents were characters in a television sitcom. 'Pretend there's a frame around 'em like the Tube, pretend they're a show you're watching. You can go into it if you want, or you can just watch and not go into it.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.

It was the end of something—if not his innocence, at least of his faith that things would always happen gradually enough to afford time to do something about it in.

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator. - Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)