Quotes About Innocence

It was the beginning of the war. I was twelve years old, my parents were alive, and God still dwelt in our town.

Why had they arrested me? 'Because of a word, perhaps, or a silent grimace,' Razziel Paritus suggested, stroking his beard. 'Or for something your parents were supposed to have done or said. In this country denouncing people is a social duty, a moral imperative, a kind of state religion. It's also possible they arrested you for no reason at all. That your only crime is your innocence.

One that most horrible day, even among all those other bad days, when the child witnessed the hanging (yes!) of another child who, he tells us, had the face of a sad angel, he heard someone behind him groan: For God's sake, where is God? And from within me, I heard a voice answer: Where He is? This is where - hanging here from this gallows.

Oh, to recover faith! And the innocence of before. To live in the moment, to hold desire and fulfillment in one's grasp, to fuse with someone else, with oneself; to become infinity

Señor Jaime," said little Moquetin, a bright-eyed imp of six, "why is it that your face is always red?" Jim countered, "Why is it that your face is always brown?" "Because it is much prettier that way," was the unexpected reply.

We often tend to ignore how much of a child is still in all of us.

It is the beginning and the end of the astrological calendar, and so it is said that children born on March 21 are ancient sounds who possess the wonder and innocence of newborns.

Innocence might be its own reward, but when it boardered on naivete, if not stupidity, it was unforgivable.

The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of children at play in the neighborhood, Ginger Rogers on the black-and-white screen.

and there is such honesty and innocence to her voice I want to hold her. The bedside lamplight is a rich golden color, and it is falling on her face in a way that makes it seem gilded. For a moment, L.D. looks to me like an angel. Another case of illusion only being the larger truth.

you once lay there, the vernix not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.

No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.

Most of the time, perhaps 99 percent of the time, the defendant is guilty; his screams are the final protest of a human being about to lost his most precious possession, his freedom.

Polly was the same age as Alma, but daintier and startlingly beautiful. She looked like a perfect figurine carved out of fine French soap, into which someone had inlaid a pair of glittering peacock-blue eyes. But it was the tiny pink pillow of her mouth that made this girl more than simply pretty; it made her an unsettling little voluptuary, a Bathsheba wrought in miniature.

He noticed that his children felt fully entitled to make up songs all the time, and when they were done with them, they would toss them out "like little origami things, or paper airplanes.

Percy romped up and dropped a sadly mangled, dead frog at her feet, then backed away and sat proudly by his prize, looking at Miss Greaves as if expecting praise. She absently ruffled the spaniel's ears.

He opened his eyes to see her licking her lips nervously. I... er... We should remove your banyan. At least the upper portion. If he were a man given to mirth he might've grinned then. She was playing in the flames of his control. Did she not understand her own peril? But her blush had deepened and she was deliciously out of sorts. He simply could not resist- either his own urges or her innocent befuddlement. He spread his arms and said gravely, Be my guest.

I felt sure, glaring at the children as they settled onto the sand with their shovels, that these creatures were never threatened by the grimness of history, either. Then, looking down on their glossy heads, I realized that they were indeed threatened; they were simply unaware of it. We were all vulnerable.

His house to me was a child was a heart of happiness. If there is a wonder childhood possesses which makes it forever superior to what shall come after, it is the happy and uncritical love of whatever is happy, place or person, it does not matter which.

The very feel of her hand, even through its glove, was reassuring; it was the sort of hand, he thought, that children would like to hold in the dark.

Well, trials are the portion of mankind, and gardeners have their share, and in any case it is better to be tried by plants than persons, seeing that with plants you know that it is you who are in the wrong, and with persons it is always the other way about—and who is there among us who has not felt the pangs of injured innocence, and known them to be grievous?

to go into the garden in its snowed-up state is like going into a bath of purity. The first breath on opening the door is so ineffably pure that it makes me gasp, and I feel a black and sinful object in the midst of all the spotlessness.

The young man smiled—certainly a very personable young man—and explained that the light was no longer strong enough to do any more. Again in this explanation did he call me gnädiges Fräulein, and again was I touched by so much innocence. And his German, too, was touching; it was so conscientiously grammatical, so laboriously put together, so like pieces of Goethe learned by heart. By

If one could only get hold of the children! I sighed, as I went up the steps into the schoolhouse; catch them young, and put them in a garden, with no older people of their own class for ever teaching them by example what is ugly, and unworthy, and gross.