Quotes about innocence

Innocence has nothing to dread.

Crime, like virtue, has its degrees;

And timid innocence was never known

To blossom suddenly into extreme license.

This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.

The flip side of innocence is shame.

Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.

Childhood is a state of mind, whether it's a nostalgic return to innocence or a sudden flashback to unease and dread. If the innocence of childhood is being protected and comforted, the precarity of childhood is when one feels the least protected and comfortable.

I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your own potential.

"I suppose one could scarcely have had innocence and experience. Being young is very exhausting and unsatisfactory, really—although it looks so nice."

Innocence is in many ways ignorance.

It’s hard to recover. You become not so innocent. You become, in a way, more sophisticated, which I think you shouldn’t. We should all have more simple happiness . . . . You become bitter.

“Innocence is more false a god than the ones in our songs,” Venli said, sitting beside her sister. “People who chase it will find themselves enslaved.”

Newborns reminded her of tiny Buddhas, faces full of divinity […] That holiness, somehow, disappeared, and Lacy was always left wondering where in this world it might go.