Innocence Quotes

During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn't do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison.On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.

~ Alan Alda

I had never seen a real live dead person.

~ Jacqueline Kelly

Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.

~ Paul Fussell

When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.

~ Angela Carter

O God, I love you to the edge of madness, Venetia, but I'm not mad yet--not so mad that I don't know how disastrous it might be to you--to us both! You don't realize what an advantage I should be taking of your innocence!

~ Georgette Heyer

His own naivety taunted him like a flicker of madness.

~ Jane Harper

But you were a goody-goody, you said.' 'Even goody-goodies think about such things. In fact, I would say that's what defines us. We're always thinking about the things we don't dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality.

~ Laura Lippman

If Innocent is happy, it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The feature that makes people look at her twice, sometimes with suspicious glances, is her eyes. They are too large, wide-set, slanted a bit. And they judge, those eyes do, they watch and they take note and they judge all that they see, and lots of folks do not like that much.To the innocent, her eyes are arresting. To a person with something on his conscience, they seem too knowing.

~ Michael Grant

Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt, it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified.

~ P.d. James

Just because you act a little guilty doesn't mean you're innocent.

~ Charlie Chan

Experience had taught me that innocence seldom utters outraged shrikes. Guilt does. Innocence is a mighty shield, and the man or woman covered by it, is much more likely to answer calmly: 'My life is blameless. Look into it, if you like, for you will find nothing.' That is the tone of innocence.

~ Whittaker Chambers

Hester, meanwhile, says we should live all of life back to front. We should be born old and age younger. Our baptism should be a ritual of our funeral. We should die as infants, content in our mothers' arms, having lost all our learning and all sense of disappointment. If only we could die, she says, not knowing we'd ever grieved.

~ Timothy Schaffert

Innocence isn't something we lose, but realise we don't need.

~ Chloe Thurlow

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

~ Albert Camus

If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

~ Charlotte Brontë

The world’s crawling with stupid, innocent girls, and I’m just one of them, self-consciously chasing after dreams that will never come true.

~ Haruki Murakami

Innocence is a kind of insanity

~ Graham Greene

I’m not comfortable in this stadium,” I explained, trying to look calm.“I know. And you hate Fang looking at those girls. But we’re still havingfun, and Fang still loves you, and you’ll still save the world. Okay?

~ James Patterson

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

He can feel them, reaching out for the child, groping their way to its purity…

~ J. Valor

Innocence is the most intelligent admission of stupidity.

~ Raheel Farooq

You're not going to answer, are you? Jaenelle asked after a minute of teeth-grinding silence.No.Don't you know the answer?Whether I know the answer or not is beside the point. It's not something a man discusses with a young girl.But you know the answer.Daemon growled.

~ Anne Bishop

If we put aside the practicality, we may find our wishes to be very innocent.

~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

Oh, tell me, who first declared, who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else… . Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Although I was an imaginative child, prone to nightmares, I had persuaded my parents to take me to Madame Tussauds waxworks in London, when I was six, because I had wanted to visit the Chamber of Horrors, expecting the movie-monster Chambers of Horrors I'd read about in my comics. I had wanted to thrill to waxworks of Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf-man. Instead I was walked through a seemingly endless sequence of dioramas of unremarkable, glum-looking men and women who had murdered people - usually lodgers and members of their own families - and who were then murdered in turn: by handing, by the electric chair, in gas chambers. Most of them were depicted with their victims in awkward social situations - seated about a dinner table, perhaps, as their poisoned family members expired. The plaques that explained who they were also told me that the majority of them had murdered their families and sold the bodies to anatomy. It was then that the word anatomy garnered its own edge of horror for me. I did not know what anatomy was. I knew only that anatomy made people kill their children.

~ Neil Gaiman

It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.

~ Ian Mcewan

Innocence eroded into nightmare.All because of very bad touch.Love, corrupted.

~ Ellen Hopkins

How quickly we come around,' Sazed whispered. 'It wasn't long ago that men were forced to watch the Lord Ruler cut the heads from innocent people. Now we do it to ourselves.

~ Brandon Sanderson

We look for things or people that are incorruptible. There is nothing incorruptible, merely uncorrupted. We neglect the role we play. We value innocence, but only the kind we cannot alter. We throw mud at purity and mock it for its stain.

~ James Rozoff

I can't bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

~ Thomas Mann

Travellers scowl at us, and countrymen give us scornful names. 'Strider' I am to one fat man who lives within a day's march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly. Yet we would not have it otherwise. If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

But in the absence of eye-witness there's always a doubt, sometimes only the shadow of a doubt. The law says 'reasonable doubt', but I think a defendant's entitled to the shadow of doubt. There's always the possibility, no matter how improbable, that he's innocent.

~ Harper Lee

I see you exhausted by poisonous flies, I see you bleeding and torn at a hundred spots, and your pride refuses even to be angry. They would have blood from you in all innocence, blood is what bloodless souls crave - and therefore they sting in all innocence.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

But Percy Jackson has always been reliable. You have nothing to fear. Besides, he likes me. I taught him everything he knows.”She frowned. “You did?”I found her innocence somewhat charming. So many obvious things she did not know. “Of course. Now let’s go up.

~ Rick Riordan

Innocent like the first dreamsA few words dropped on the paper;Contaminated they were by the surrounding air,Fame swarmed, naivety disappeared!

~ Neelam Saxena Chandra

Innocence has no place alongside immortality.

~ Courtney M. Privett

Maturity is the moment one regains one's innocence.

~ Marty Rubin

Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

~ William Blake