Quotes About Innocence

Whenever a child says "I don't believe in fairies" there's a little fairy somewhere that falls right down dead.

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.

Looking back at it, it seems to me that I was blown here and there like a dead leaf whipped about by the autumn winds till at last it finds lodgment in some cozy fence corner. When I left school at fourteen I was as unsophisticated as a boy could be; I knew no more of the world and its strange ways than the gentle, saintly woman who taught me my prayers in the convent. Before me twentieth birthday I was on the docket of criminal court, on trial for burglary.

If I could wish for anything else, it would be a little more moderation, a little more tolerance, and a little more of the trustful innocence of that boy who learned his prayers at the knee of the gentle, kindly old priest at the Sisters' Convent school.

Children often have imaginary playmates. I suspect that half of them are really their guardian angels. -Eileen Elias Freeman, The Angels' Little Instruction Book

When we were merely little girls, still full of innocence and wonder, I tied your shoes and made sure your lip wasn't bleeding. "Best friends since third grade," we've always said. We've been to hell and back, with our bleeding hearts and tampered souls.

I wish," she continued, turning back to herself, "that there was a path of words I could walk down and they would lead me into a grotto pool where I could re-purify myself and return to the girl I was. But there isn't a path, or even a girl. She's gone, and I'm stuck trying to invent who I want to be, and I'm finding that figuring out who I want to be is so much harder than just being who I was when I was a little kid.

So yes, this means dirt is good. Mud pies rule.

A man in Black and White" Some years ago, a child was asked whether he liked radio or television best. The boy said radio, because the pictures were better.

One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. "Oh, no," I said. "Disneyland burned down." He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.

Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child.

It was a time when even the guilty displayed a rare innocence. In

I see Donny turning to throw the words over his shoulder on his way across the lawn to the porch. Casually, but with an odd sort of sincerity about him, as though this were absolute gospel. "My mom says Meg's the lucky one," he said. "My mom says she got off easy.

Bring a baby to any grown-up -- even the gruffest or most inhibited -- and watch what happens. Without exception, they will do something to try and make the baby laugh. Psychologists, anthropologists, and other experts have theories about why this is so. For me it's enough to believe that whenever a baby laughs, our humanity is somehow exalted.

We Built a Castle Near the Rocks, we built it out of sand. Our fortress was an ice-cream box with turret, tall and grand. Our men were twigs, our gun were straws from which we'd sipped at lunch. We had the best of wars... till someone's foot went CRUNCH! [Joan Walsh Anglund]

I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.

Your friend is wrongly accused!

Children think around corners.

Nothing in the world is like this- a bright white page with pale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencil the soft hush of it moving finally one day into letters.

Kids are something. All they can see is the beauty in a moment.

He thinks I'm an angel. What would an angel say?

It reminds me of those carefree days in elementary school," Adam said, taking a sop of milk. "Where the only thing you worried about was being first on the swings, or being picked last for kickball.

I look at this place (Antigua), I look at these people (Antiguans), and I cannot tell whether I was brought up by, and so come from, children, eternal innocents, or artists who have not yet found eminence in a world too stupid to understand, or lunatics who have made their own lunatic asylum, or an exquisite combination of all three.

Yes, for every child, rich or poor, there's a time of running through a dark place; and there's no word for a child's fear, and no ears to head it if there was a word, and no one to understand it if they heard. God save the little children! They abide and they endure.