Innocence Quotes

Esteem for the army - never in this country regarded, in the continental manner, as a popular expression of the national will - implies a kind of innocence.

~ Anthony Powell

(...) there are these fading, ageing girls who constantly let themselves go over the edge without resisting, strong girls, still unused in their innermost selves, who have never been loved. Perhaps, Lord, you mean me to leave everything and go love them. Otherwise why is it so difficult for me not to follow them when they pass me in the street? Why do I suddenly invent the sweetest, most nocturnal words, and why does my voice settle sweetly inside me between my throat and heart? Why do I imagine how I, with unutterable caution, would hold them to my breath, these dolls that life has been playing with, flinging their arms apart springtime after springtime for nothing, and again for nothing, until they became slack in the shoulders. They've never fallen from a very high hope, so they're not broken; but they're badly chipped already and too far gone. Only stray cats come to them in the evening in their rooms and keep giving them furtive scratches and then sleep on top of them. Sometimes I follow one of them down a couple of streets. They walk past the houses, people are continually coming along who blot them out, they go on fading until they are nothing.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I look upon the gift of my life as a wondrous journey.

~ Maureen Brady

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood - she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The innocent must not suffer.

~ Agatha Christie

We would be a few years younger,if every day we meditated for five minutes on the meanings of the word innocence.

~ Alexandra Vasiliu

Out of the mouths of babes comes only bubbles. Out of the mouths of men like me, only babble.

~ Warren Eyster

Isaiah grabs my hand and leads me away from the police...My heart stutters. He's holding my hand. A guy is holding my hand. Touching it. Like his fingers entwined with mine. I've never held a guy's hand before and it feels good. So good. Warm. Strong. Awesome. And it would only be a million times better if the guy holding my hand liked me.

~ Katie Mcgarry

Her innocence was maddening. She should know. She should know what her steward had done. She should know it to be her fault whether she’d given the order or not–and whether she knew or not. Innocent? Her? Never.He did not want her to know. He did not want her to see. But:Look at me, he found himself thinking furiously at her. Look at me. She lifted her eyes, and did.

~ Marie Rutkoski

And who isn’t less innocent than they lead us to believe? That’s one of the fundamental truths about human nature.

~ Glenn Haybittle

Those who recognize their innocence do not expect, receive, or accept punishment from any outside source.

~ Alan Cohen

She shrugged innocently at him and asked, “What I do?

~ Jason Medina

Now it seemed unbelievable, the innocence of a girl in a fairy tale.

~ Janet Fitch

My eyes were drawn to him as if my world was black and white and he was a rainbow.

~ L S May

We are all the same and need to think that we are innocent. However, we do blame others just to be innocent. We simply believe blaming will wash out ourselves. More we search innocence more we blame others. What we need to understand our purity instead of trying to prove that we are blameless.

~ Umut Kisa

We shoot our heroes and enjoy peripeteia as a spectacle akin to sport and perhaps harshly disavowing the past protects us from the disappointment of our outsized hopes--who knows, really, but shifts in taste don't fully account for the phenomenon. At any rate, nearly everything urgent and alive becomes doo-wop down the road, at least in this country's pop culture, and along the way a somewhat self-hating irony lays waste not only to the work but to the desires it once carried. It's like we die into adulthood.

~ Charles D'ambrosio

This woman might have a daughter, but she was as innocent and pure as newly fallen snow.

~ Gena Showalter

No one wanted to be responsible for telling the young and innocent Princess about the things a man and a woman could do together. No one wanted to take away my innocence. Well I was now 112 years old, I figured I was old enough to learn.

~ Laura Greenwood

...he looked as if nothing hard in the world had touched him...

~ Dean Koontz

People get it wrong when they talk about innocence: they think it’s something to do with ignorance about the facts of sex and all the nasty things that happen in the world. But facts don’t change people: it’s understanding how the facts feel that does.

~ Alexia Casale

I don't know how to defend myself: surprised innocence cannot imagine being under suspicion.

~ Pierre Corneille

Innocence is a better world.

~ Annie Dillard

When we lose our innocence - when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot - we take leave of our sense.

~ Annie Dillard

Even if I could live forever,” she said to the baby, “I still don’t know which way I would teach you. I was once so free and innocent. I too laughed for no reason.“But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And then I taught my daughter, your mother, to shed her innocence so she would not be hurt as well.

~ Amy Tan

Monsieur, innocence is its own crown! Innocence has only to act to be noble! She is as august in rags as fleur de lys.

~ Victor Hugo

Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

...I'm a fool. I expect too much, then I'm angry because nothing ever works out the way I want. When I was young and full of hopes and aspirations, I didn't know I would get hurt so often. I think I'll get tough and won't ache again, then my fragile shell shatters, and again, symbolically, my blood is spilled with the tears I shed. I pull myself back together again, go on, convince myself there is a reason for everything, and at some point in my life it will be disclosed. And when I have what I want, I hope to god it stays long enough to let me know I have it, and it wont hurt when it goes, for I don't expect it to stay, not now. I'm like a doughnut, always being punch out in the middle, and constantly I go around searching for the missing piece, and on and on it goes, never ending, only beginning...

~ V.c. Andrews

We'll never feel safe again, and so it's bye-bye innocence. It's been nice knowing you, but you're gone now.

~ John Marsden

Shocked?” Juliet queried, the light pink tint on her cheeks the only telling sign of her discomfort with the conversation.He nodded. “Yes. I had no idea my little girl knew what fluffies were.”Juliet opened her mouth to respond but was cut off by more misguided innocence from Kate. “They’re the fluffy things Juliet keeps hidden in her dress here and here,” she said proudly, tapping her chest to indicate just where these fluffy objects were located.Patrick blinked. “That’s quite enough, Katie love. Why don’t you go paint some flowers or something. I need to have a word alone with Juliet.

~ Rose Gordon

The flow of spiritual connectedness and oneness with life will dwell in you if your heart and mind is open and innocent.

~ Bryant Mcgill

The hour of spring was dark at last,sensuous memories of sunlight past,I stood alone in garden bowersand asked the value of my hours.Time was spent or time was tossed,Life was loved and life was lost.I kissed the flesh of tender girls,I heard the songs of vernal birds.I gazed upon the blushing light,aware of day before the night.So let me ask and hear a thought:Did I live the spring I’d sought?It's true in joy, I walked along,took part in dance, and sang the song.and never tried to bind an hourto my borrowed garden bower;nor did I once entreata day to slumber at my feet.Yet days aren't lulled by lyric song,like morning birds they pass along,o'er crests of trees, to none belong;o'er crests of trees of drying dew,their larking flight, my hands, eschewThus I’ll say it once and true...From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered,I learned that time cannot be spent,It only can be squandered.

~ Roman Payne

I wanted to tell her to never change, to never let her heart get trampled down and hard. But she’d remember that, too. And right now she didn’t know that there was any other way to be. That her heart, her soul, could ever be anything other than soft and lovely and fertile. And she needed to stay that way as long as she could.

~ R.j. Keller

There's something about seeing people when they have just wake up--before they have a chance to put on the face they show everyone else. There's like this last hint of innocence.

~ Robin Brande

In innocence everything has its truest meaning.

~ Calvin W. Allison

A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Innocence is an infinitely fragile thing and thought can sometimes injure, even destroy it. - Pg. 254

~ Ellis Peters

...[I]t is pain to think of innocence in ruin.

~ Richard Llewellyn

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.

~ Audre Lorde

You can never hurt me,And you will never cause me painCause you're made of fire,And I'm the heavy rain.

~ Ghaith Sal

The really pure in heart know nothing of what goes on around them each day, each night; never realize what poisonous weeds spring up beneath their childish feet.

~ François Mauriac