Quotes About Innocence

But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty.But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt (112)

I remember what it was like...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete. James Baldwin

And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitability undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgement, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.

It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt.

Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist.

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

The sunlight came into the room with the peacefulness one remembers from rooms in one's early childhood—a sunlight encountered later only in one's dreams.

There is no reason for you try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

I was often allowed to watch them drink their cocktails.

John looked with a child's impenetrable gravity into the preacher's face, as though he were turning this question over in his mind and would answer when he had thought it

anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. The

To find out, to find out, you keep saying, as though we were accomplices in a crime. We have not committed any crime.

C'est leur innocence qui constitue leur crime

Non serve cercar di andare troppo a fondo in questo mistero che è tanto poco semplice quanto poco innocuo. Non sappiamo abbastanza di noi stessi. Credo sia meglio esser consci di non saperne niente, così si può crescere con il mistero e intanto il mistero cresce in te. Ma la giorno d'oggi, naturalmente, tutti sanno tutto ed è per questo che tanta gente si perde.

It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

Una cosa o l'altra: ci vuole forza per ricordare, ci vuole un altro tipo di forza per dimenticare, ci vuole un eroe per fare le due cose insieme. Chi ricorda corteggia la pazzia attraverso il dolore, il dolore dell'eterno ritorno della morte alla propria innocenza; chi dimentica corteggia un altro tipo di follia, la follia della negazione del dolore e dell'odio per l'innocenza; e il mondo si divide per lo più tra pazzi che ricordano e pazzi che dimenticano. Gli eroi sono rari.

No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt. No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again. And this might be a great relief if I did not also know that, when the knife has fallen, Giovanni, if he feels anything will feel relief.

It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt. No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again.

As pessoas que lembram correm o risco de enlouquecer de dor, a dor da morte de sua inocência, a recorrer eternamente; as que esquecem se arriscam a mergulhar em outra espécie de loucura, a loucura de negar a dor e odiar a inocência; e o mundo basicamente se divide entre loucos que lembram e loucos que esquecem.

Once one has begun to suspect this much about the world — once one has begun to suspect, that is, that one is not, and never will be, innocent, for the reason that no one is — some of the self-protective veils between oneself and reality begin to fall away.

It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare. Jacques