#innocence

All things truly wicked start from innocence. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#innocence #start #things #truly #wicked

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#children #hard #i #i think #idea

Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime. ↗

— Maximilien Robespierre

#attempts #butchers #crime #innocence #might

The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future. ↗

— Edith Wharton

#the-age-of-innocence #age

He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate. ↗

— Edith Wharton

#age

Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#innocence #useful-idiots #age

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#innocence #writing #beauty

But I think parents aren't teachers anymore. Parents -- or a whole lot of us, at least -- lead by mouth instead of by example. It seems to me that if a child's hero is their mother or father -- or even better, both of them in tandem -- then the rough road of learning and experience is going to be smoothed some. And every little bit of smoothing helps, in this rough old world that wants children to be miniature adults, devoid of charm and magic and the beauty of innocence. ↗

— Robert R. McCammon

#childhood #innocence #parenting #beauty

I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't. ↗

— Dylan Thomas

#earthy #hope #innocence #love #optimism

Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word--the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again. ↗

— Philip Larkin

#expectation #innocence #sadness #war #change