Quotes About Innocence

We first become salesmen as children in the confession booths of our parents.

The whole thing of this business is to retain your enthusiasm and, in a sense, retain your innocence and try to practice as much humility as possible.

William Blake really is important, my cornerstone. Nobody ever told me before he did that childhood was such a damned serious business.

When you're eight years old nothing is your business.

When kids my age were picking up toy cars, I used to buy toy guns.

I never rode in an automobile until I was 12.

I'm still that little girl who lisped and sat in the back of the car and threw vegetables at the back of her head when we drove home from the market. That never goes.

All of us collect fortunes when we are children. A fortune of colors, of lights, and darkness, of movement, of tensions. Some of us have the fantastic chance to go back to his fortune when grown up.

Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, 'then once there must have been dragons.

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule. I

Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders and fought by boys.

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.

Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.

Para ti todos os homens são maus? Só as crianças são boas? - Sim. - Então eu também sou maus? - Não - disse Ngnunga- O camarada Professor é capaz de ser ainda um bocado criança, não sei.

Als das Kind Kind war, erwachte es einmal in einem fremden Bett und jetzt immer wieder, erschienen ihm viele Menschen schön und jetzt nur noch im Glücksfall

Who farted?" Dan asked. "It's our clothes," Amy said. "Our clothes farted?" Dan asked. "I don't know them, ladies and gentlemen," Nellie said under her breath, "never saw them in my life …

In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for nearly an hour in his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm wind, the leaves dancing, the clouds flying…the child was not observing; he was at rest in the very center of the universe, a part of things, unaware of endings and beginning, still in unison with the primordial nature of creation, letting all light and phenomena pour through.

The boy Weneluke wove hand patterns with a string, working skillfully into abstract designs on all eight fingers: one of these represented a man and woman facing each other, and, by manipulating each sex, he arrived at a nice parody of copulation.

If nobody is innocent, who can be guilty?

The wildwood brings on mild nostalgia, not for home or place, but for lost innocence—the paradise lost that, as Proust said, is the only paradise.

Those old songs certainly brought back memories. Why did the past always seem so much brighter than the present? Because he had been more innocent then?

realized with a shock that the loss of innocence never stopped happening, that he was still losing it, that it was like a wound that never healed, and he would probably go on losing it, drop by drop, until the day he died.

Was it the age of my innocence, Or was it the lost Land of Oz? Was it only a foolish illusion, The summer that never was?

The central argument against abortion, put as a formal argument, would go something like this: First premise: It is wrong to kill an innocent human being. Second premise: A human fetus is an innocent human being. Conclusion: Therefore, it is wrong to kill a human fetus. The usual liberal response is to deny the second premise of this argument.