#innocence

I'm not...' Angharad began, but then she thought. Not what? Not a bad person? Perhaps. But had she never known anger? Never held unkind thoughts? The stranger's observation was valid. No one was innocent of darkness. ↗

— Charles de Lint

#anger

This was me before I knew about anything hard, when my whole life was packed lunches and art projects and spelling quizzes. ↗

— Nina LaCour

#innocence #memories #art

You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret— you return to the beauty you have always been. ↗

— Aberjhani

#faith #healing #inner-peace #innocence #life-and-death

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

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

#lust #life

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

#dreaming #innocence #naivete #dreams

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all. ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#growing-up #innocence #life #loss-of-innocence #truths

I just wanted things to be simple. I didn't understand why things had to be so complicated for all the grown ups. And I decided that if growing up meant things got confusing, then I would stay little forever. I would stay simple. But unfortunately everything around me did its best not to be. The world liked to be complex. It liked to twist, to distort. To bleed you dry of whatever feeling you could muster while still letting you hold on to your sanity so that you could experience heartache at its prime. I didn't know how cold the world could be when I was eleven. If I would have known...maybe I would have packed a sweater. ↗

— A.L. Collins

#innocence #youth #experience