Quotes About Innocence

He did not recognize himself either. He was a totally new being, bald, covered with grease and blood, pink and blue eyed: he was his own baby...He was a great fat chuckling baby, and he shat and peed in his filthy trousers and kept driving.

Narcissus, gazing at his image in the pool, wept. A friend passing by saw him and asked, "Narcissus, why do you weep?" "Because my face has changed," Narcissus said. "Do you cry because you grow older?" "No. I see that I am no longer innocent. I have been gazing at myself long and long, and so doing have worn out my innocence.

We were so raw that we could be seduced by civility.

They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow.

But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up.

We've heard them all talk about Dust, and they're so afraid of it, and you know what? We believed them, even though we could see that what they were doing was wicked and evil and wrong... We thought Dust must be bad too, because they were grown up and they said so. But what if it isn't? What if it's—' She said breathlessly, 'Yeah! What if it's really good...

It might not be fair, but no one's to blame.

She's innocent, and she loves easily.

human life is difficult; there are profundities and compromises and mysteries that look to the innocent eye like betrayal.

And when Rusakov discovered Dust, at last there was physical proof that something happened when innocence changed into experience.

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book. - Carnegie Medal Acceptance Speech

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.

When you're young, you do think that things last forever

Themes that are too large for adult fiction can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book - Philip Pullman (Hunt and Lenz, 2001, p. 122 as cited by Hunt, 2005, p. 204)

When we are born we are magical and loving and full of wonder. But darkness and ignorance surround us at every corner. Until the day someone calls us a monster or a devil and we believe them.

When we are born we are all wonderful. But, gradually, masks and streets are erected around us, walls and lies fence us in, make us prisoners, trap us inside our skulls, turn hearts to stone, until the magic—once bright and sparkling—turns black and blistered in our minds.

It's a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, Momma, do we believe in winter?

It was impossible to believe that Alan was lying in that pale, plain pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve.

Well, good Christ, how was I supposed to know all that, Hannah? Who looks into the fine points when he's hungry? I'm eight years old and chocolate pudding happens to get me hot. All I have to do is see that deep chocolatey surface gleaming out at me from the refrigerator, and my life isn't my own.

Why doesn't she call the cops and get me shipped off to children's prison, if this is how incorrigible I really am? "Alexander Portnoy, aged five, you are hereby sentenced to hang by your neck until you are dead for refusing to say you are sorry to your mother." You'd think the child lapping up their milk and taking baths with his duck and his boats in their tub was the most wanted criminal in America.

They" are violent. "They" are dangerous. And "we" are innocent.

Each was a talisman with magical properties. They were imbued with memory, story, and event, and in the course of time had gone from mere phenomena to sacred vessels of personal history. They were simultaneously a nuisance and completely necessary. My mother had grown old without losing the better part of innocence when it came to keepsakes. "Look

As a result of the communist victory (and our efforts to make America lose), more people — more poor Indo-Chinese peasants — were killed by the marxist victors in the first three years of the communist peace than had been killed on all sides in the thirteen years of the anti-communist war. This is a fact that has caused some of us veterans of those years to reconsider our commitments and our innocence then.

The greatest lessons to be learned about life, love, purpose, meaning, and priority are to be learned from children.