Quotes & Sayings About Innocence And Death

Auguries of innocence
He who mocks the infant's faith
Shall be mock'd in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne'er get out.
He who respects the infant's faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child's toys and the old man's reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons. — William Blake

I take the rawest, realest moments in anyone's life and I open them up and lay them bare. The innocence of a five year old child, the awkwardness of a teenager's first sexual encounter, the heartbreak of longing for a relationship you can't have, confronting the possibility of the death of your newborn child, whatever it is, you open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day. You have to put yourself out there as a writer, you can't play it safe. Great writing isn't safe. — Dan Alatorre

I had hated these ponies for the part they played in my father's death but now I realized the notion was fanciful, that it was wrong to charge blame to these pretty beasts who knew neither good nor evil but only innocence. I say that of these ponies. I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well, that is superstitious "claptrap." My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33 — Charles Portis

The world was alive, the sky descending; our times were lullabies and sad goodbyes. — Nicholaus Patnaude

The dead are mute, but the living still have voice with which to protest their innocence. Often their objections are noisy and pious, impossible to refute since the person who could condemn them has been silenced forever. — Sue Grafton

I smell guilt. There is a stench of guilt upon the air.
I see you all, whole and healthy, with your powers intact - such prompt appearances! - and I ask myself ... why did this band of wizards never come to the aid of their master, to whom they swore eternal loyalty? And I answer myself, they must have believed me broken, they thought I was gone. They slipped back among my enemies, and they pleaded innocence, and ignorance, and bewitchment ...
And then I ask myself, but how could they have believed I would not rise again? They, who knew the steps I took, long ago, to guard myself against mortal death? They, who had seen proofs of the immensity of my power in the times when I was mightier than any wizard living? And I answer myself, perhaps they believed a still greater power could exist, one that could vanquish even Lord Voldemort ... perhaps they now pay allegiance to another ... — J.K. Rowling

We all lose our innocence soon enough; it's inescapable. Most of us aren't emotionally or intellectually ready for it until our thirties or even later, however, so when one loses it prematurely, in childhood and adolescence, through divorce or the sudden early death of a parent, it can leave one fixated on that loss for a lifetime. Because it's premature, it feels unnatural, violent and unnecessary, a permanent, gratuitous wounding, and it leaves one angry at the world, — Russell Banks

Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has a style of its own, has the varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty that are appropriate to it. Each age will take certain kinds of suffering for granted, will patiently accept certain wrongs. Human life becomes a real hell of suffering only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. Required to live in the Middle Ages, someone from the Graeco-Roman period would have died a wretched death by suffocation, just as a savage inevitably would in the midst our civilization. Now, there are times when a whole generation gets caught to such an extent between two eras, two styles of life, that nothing comes naturally to it since it has lost all sense of morality, security and innocence. A man of Nietzsche's mettle had to endure our present misery more than a generation in advance. Today, thousands are enduring what he had to suffer alone and without being understood. — Hermann Hesse

WWI is a romantic war, in all senses of the word. An entire generation of men and women left the comforts of Edwardian life to travel bravely, and sometimes even jauntily, to almost certain death. At the very least, any story or novel about WWI is about innocence shattered in the face of experience. — Anita Shreve

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

Horror need not always be a long-fanged gentleman in evening clothes or a dismembered corpse or a doctor who keeps a brain in his gold fish bowl. It may be a warm sunny day, the innocence of girlhood and hints of unexplored sexuality that combine to produce a euphoria so intense it becomes transporting, a state beyond life or death. Such horror is unspeakable not because it is gruesome but because it remains outside the realm of things that can be easily defined or explained in conventional ways. — Vincent Canby

The fool says 'I never intended to kill. I meant only to wound.' But I tell you that if you prick a finger with a poisoned thorn you may not claim innocence when the heart dies. Do not plant a weed and pretend surprise when it grows to strangle your garden. For, I tell you that hate is to kill, for from hatred grows death as surely as life grows from love. Therefore do not nurture hatred, but love, even for those who hate you in return. Hatred wins many battles, and yet love will triumph. — Michael Grant

Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part,
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now, if thou wouldst, when all have giv'n him over,
From death to life thou might'st him yet recover. — Michael Drayton

For that purpose Christ instituted holy baptism, thereby to clothe you with his righteousness. It is tantamount to his saying, My righteousness shall be your righteousness; my innocence, your innocence. Your sins indeed are great, but by baptism I bestow on you my righteousness; I strip death from you and clothe you with my life. — Martin Luther

Do you who are a Christian desire to be revenged and vindicated, and the death of Jesus Christ has not yet been revenged, nor His innocence vindicated? — Saint Augustine

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband's death - his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently - "shrewdly" and "reasonably" - she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection - a "hospital" infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance! — Joyce Carol Oates

Each killing steals a bit of humanity until a murderer is nothing more than an animal. A hunger replaces the spirit. A want for what was lost, but as with innocence, the soul can never be replaced. Joy, love, and peace flee such a vessel and in their stead blooms a desire for blood and death. — Michael J. Sullivan

We try and map boundaries, and to string fence - we try to set up a border between life and death, between man and nature, and complicity versus innocence. But the truth is, there is no complicity, there is no innocence; and there is no death, there is only life. — Rick Bass

Because glamour mythically opposes death and decay its ideal model of perfection is youth. The features of youth dictate many of the facets of glamour's criteria. Small snub noses, fair hair, smooth featureless skin, innocence, Picturing youth as a target of sexual lust inevitably encourages the sexual abuse of children. — Stefan Szczelkun

We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite. — Flannery O'Connor

Some caricatures suggest that a conservative would be reluctant to represent a convicted murderer. That may be true, if the client is clearly guilty. Although every defendant deserves a lawyer, I've handled too many horrible criminal cases to have any interest in representing violent criminals. But John Thompson was innocent. And critical to supporting the death penalty is ensuring that we vigorously protect the innocent. DNA has enabled many guilty persons to be convicted, and it has proven the innocence of many others. — Ted Cruz

I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death — Lin Yutang

Death is not "an eternal sleep!" Citizens! efface from the tomb that motto, graven by sacrilegious hands, which spreads over all nature a funereal crape, takes from oppressed innocence its support, and affronts the beneficent dispensation of death! Inscribe rather thereon these words: "Death is the commencement of immortality! — Maximilien Robespierre

Deanna Durbin's movies are about innocence and sweetness. They're from a different time and a different place. Outside the movie house, there was Depression, poverty, war, death, and loss. Audiences then were willing to pretend, to enter into a game of escape. No one really thought that the world was like a Deanna Durbin movie, they just wanted to pretend it was for about an hour and a half. — Jeanine Basinger

Red and white, the Tudor rose that symbolized the union between the Red Rose of Lancaster and the White Rose of York, blood and snow, passion and purity, fire and ice, hell and heaven, sinner and saint, conquest and surrender, whore and virgin, the red dazzle of rubies and the nacreous lustrous shimmer of pearls, innocence born from a bloody womb, the blood is the life, the cold white marble of death - a tomb effigy; red roses for the blood of martyrs. — Brandy Purdy

When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy-girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street ... it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death ... And they should! ... For they are in life. — Roman Payne

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity. — Gail Caldwell

I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece-spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart. — Dennis Lehane

He who mocks the infant's faith
Shall be mock'd in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne'er get out.

He who respects the infant's faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child's toys and the old man's reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.

- "Auguries of Innocence — William Blake

And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again. — Orson Scott Card

I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime. — James Baldwin

The road to the kingdom of childhood, governed by ingenuousness and innocence, is thus regained in the horror of atonement. The purity of love is regained in its intimate truth which, as I said, is that of death. Death and the instant of divine intoxication merge when they both oppose those intentions of Good which are based on rational calculation. And death indicates the instant which, in so far as it is instantaneous, renounces the calculated quest for survival. The instant of the new individual being depended on the death of other beings. Had they not died there would have been no room for new ones. Reproduction and death condition the immortal renewal of life; they condition the instant which is always new. That is why we can only have a tragic view of the enchantment of life, but that is also why tragedy is the symbol of enchantment. — Georges Bataille

But since the will of man could turn either way, God secured this grace that He had given by making it conditional from the first upon two things--namely, a law and a place. He set them in His own paradise, and laid upon them a single prohibition. If they guarded the grace and retained the loveliness of their original innocence, then the life of paradise should be theirs, without sorrow, pain or care, and after it the assurance of immortality in heaven. But if they went astray and became vile, throwing away their birthright of beauty, then they would come under the natural law of death and live no longer in paradise, but, dying outside of it, continue in death and in corruption. — Athanasius Of Alexandria

When someone dies they can be any age you remember can't they ' she asked. As I tried to think of a reply she continued 'You probably think about the grown-up Tess because you were still close to her. But when I woke up I thought of her when she was three wearing a fairy skirt I'd got her in the Woolworth's and a policeman's helmet. Her wand was a wooden spoon. On the bus yesterday I imagined holding her when she was two days old. I felt the warmth of her. I remembered all her fingers clasped around my finger so tiny they didn't even meet. I remembered the shape of her head and stroking the nape of her neck till she slept. I remembered her smell. She smelled of innocence. Other times she's thirteen and so pretty that I worry for her everytime I see a man look at her. All of those Tesses is my daughter. — Rosamund Lupton

Death had been more pitiful to them than longer life would have been. It had taken the one in the loyalty of love, and the other in the innocence of faith, from a world which for love has no recompense and for faith no fulfillment. — Ouida

He is an unsuccessful scapegoat whose heroic willingness to die for the truth will ultimately make the entire cycle of satanic violence visible to all people and therefore inoperative. The "kingdom of Satan" will give way to the "kingdom of God." Thanks to Jesus' death, the Spirit of God, alias the Paraclete (a word that signifies "the lawyer for the defense"), wins a foothold in the kingdom of Satan. He reveals the innocence of Jesus to the disciples first and then to all of us. The defense of victims is both a moral imperative and the source of our increasing power to demystify scapegoating. The Passion accounts reveal a phenomenon that unbeknownst to us generates all human cultures and still warps our human vision in favor of all sorts of exclusions and scapegoating. If this analysis is true, the explanatory power of Jesus' death is much greater than we realize, and Paul's exalted idea of the Cross as the source of all knowledge is anthropologically sound. The — Rene Girard

The loss of innocence is inevitable, but the death of innocence disturbs the natural order. The death of innocence causes an imbalance and initiates an internal war that manifests differently in each individual, but almost always includes anger, withdrawal and severe depression. — B.G. Bowers

We found Trent and pulled him off the leggy girl. "Trent, it's time to get home before your parents realize we snuck out." I said.
"What?" he asked confusedly.
"Plus the bouncer found out we were sixteen and he does not look happy." Logan added.
The girl froze, "You're sixteen? What the hell. You little perv, you're going to pay for this."
Trent sputtered, "What? No."
Logan looked at her all doe eyed innocence and said "Sorry Ma'am, we have to get home now because it's past our curfew."
Trent stood open mouthed in shock but his eyes were shooting murderous rays.
So many death glares, so little time. — Amanda Kelly

Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death! — Dylan Thomas

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare. — James Baldwin

It wasn't the intention to do something important, or to even relate about social issues. The ground is so fertile in the justice world, dealing with the death penalty and the Innocence Project, for characters that have a moral ambiguity, which we were both attracted to. It's the idea that everybody has their reasons. Whatever their actions are, whether you agree with them or not, you can understand why they're feeling that way, in terms of racism or even the death penalty. — Richard LaGravenese

If you die to everything you know,including your family,yourmemory,everything you have felt,then death is a purification,a rejuvenating process;then death brings innocence and it is only the innocent who are passionate, not the people who believe or who want to find out what happens after death. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

There was no fear of sandpaper earth, no sense of danger from a bare-skinned spill, for the boy was a child - a six-foot, one-inch growing child who knew nothing of accident, injury, dismemberment, death - who would study those lessons tomorrow, thank you, but not today. Today, it would be sufficient to be wild and free. — Tony Taylor

Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that. You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls. — Julian Barnes

Then there are also the quiet deaths. How about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or the queen of Sheba? Feel the silent distance between yourself and how you felt as a child, between yourself and those feelings of wonder and splendor and trust. Feel the mature fondness for who you once were, and your current need to protect innocence wherever you make might find it. The silence that surrounds the loss of innocence is a most serious death, and yet it is necessary for the onset of maturity.

What about the day we began working not for ourselves, but rather with the hope that our kids have a better life? Or the day we realize that, on the whole, adult life is deeply repetitive? As our lives roll into the ordinary, when our ideals sputter and dissipate, as we wash the dishes after yet another meal, we are integrating death, a little part of us is dying so that another part can live. — Matthew Sanford

I've always felt that distant train whistles heard in the dead of night are the universe's way of letting us know the best days are neither ahead nor behind us ... they're happening right now, cradled in the palms of our hands. But that doesn't change the fact that the whiskey, weed, and romance eventually runs out and the night will soon turn to day. — Dave Matthes

One time, I noticed that the little waxy strips you peel off the maxi pad adhesive were printed, over and over, with a slogan: 'Kotex Understands.' In the worst moments, when my period felt like a death - the death of innocence, the death of safety, the harbinger of a world where I was too fat, too weird, too childish, too ungainly - I'd sit hunched over on the toilet and stare at that slogan, and I'd cry. Kotex understands. Somebody, somewhere, understands. — Lindy West

He strode with the weight of robbed innocence and a stolen childhood, for a life time of pain and anger, of terror and death."
- Frank Balenger — David Morrell

Christ's death represents the loss of Satan's kingdom: the Satanic circle is broken, and the truth and grace of Jesus can now descend on those who are not afraid of accepting it. The Holy Spirit, which is to say the defender of victims, acts first on Peter and the other apostles, telling them that Jesus is innocent and that they are mistaken. Subsequently it acts on other persecutors, showing them that they too are persecutors, making them see the victim's innocence. What we call conversion is, finally, the experience of the scapegoat becoming the subjective experience of the persecutor. MSB — Rene Girard

I have lived hard and ruined the essential innocence [sic] in myself that could make it that possible [sic], and the fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps but not renunciation. — F Scott Fitzgerald

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. — James Baldwin

If the U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, they cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. On 9/11/2001, Americans noticed that payback can be a real motherfucker. — Ward Churchill

When the fight ends you can afford to relax. That's the worst part. Winner or loser you have again eyes to see around you. Blood, butchered bodies, bodies pierced by arrows. You stir inside, your heart tightens, the feeling of loss wells up. The sense of smell is the next thing to revive, adding a new dimension of pain. I closed the eyes of the last cadet, blue eyes, unseeing, his body, so small, almost a child, the youngest cadets were all gone, their faces surprised in death. Cold lips never able again to kiss a girl. It's then that the emptiness swallows you and you mourn inside. Damn you, Scharon. No! Damn you, Travellers. — Florian Armas

I am not a 'defender' of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. — Ward Churchill

Aurora, you're a child, live like one, don't act like one. Enjoy the innocence, dump the immaturity. — Noorilhuda

Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid. — Thomas Pynchon

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

Sometimes people feel they need to control everything, as if they could! Matters of life and death are out of your hands. The more you come to realize this, the harder you try to prove that you can control SOMETHING, anything. All you can really control is your response to what happens. You cannot control matters of life or death and because of this you are not accountable. You cannot be held liable for anything that you have no power over. Guilt, shame and blame make no sense when circumstances are beyond your control. — Kate McGahan

When Mantle faced the cameras for the last time a month before his death, he was a husk of a man, shrunken by cancer. The stiff brim of his 1995 All-Star Game cap dwarfed his brow. There was no Mantle Roll. He looked straight into the cameras and told us all, 'Don't be like me.'

The transformation of The Mick parallels the transformation of American culture from willful innocence to knowing cynicism. To tell his story is to tell ours. — Jane Leavy

How great inexperience and innocence is. On the authority of their parents they go to a place where they could meet their death; for the Zirder in flood is very dangerous and, given the ignorance of the children, can be incalculably dangerous. But they know nothing of death. Even if they speak its name, they do not know its essence and their aspiring life has no feeling for annihilation. If they were on the brink of death themselves, they would not know it and they would die before they found it out. — Adalbert Stifter

But that is the way with killers, I suppose. What is the end of all innocence for you is just another Tuesday morning for them, and they walk off back to their planet of death giving no more thought to the world of the living that we would give to any other tourist destination: a place to be briefly visited and returned from with souvenirs and a haunting sensation that we could have paid less for them. — Chris Cleave

That's the beautiful thing about innocence; even monsters have a pocketful of childhood memories with which to seek comfort with. — Dave Matthes

There was a picture of the family over the mantelpiece, removed thither from the front room after Mrs. Osborne's death - George was on a pony, the elder sister holding him up a bunch of flowers; the younger led by her mother's hand; all with red cheeks and large red mouths, simpering on each other in the approved family-portrait manner. The mother lay underground now, long since forgotten - the sisters and brother had a hundred different interests of their own, and, familiar still, were utterly estranged from each other. Some few score of years afterwards, when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire there is in those flaunting childish family-portraits, with their farce of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and self-satisfied. Osborne's — William Makepeace Thackeray

But we have not yet reached that point. For the moment, Ivan offers us only the tortured face of the rebel
plunged in the abyss, incapable of action, torn between the idea of his own innocence and the desire to
kill. He hates the death penalty because it is the image of the human condition, and, at the same time, he
is drawn to crime. Because he has taken the side of mankind, solitude is his lot. With him the rebellion of
reason culminates in madness. — Albert Camus

Death during adolescence feels unfair. We're young. We're invincible. Death is supposed to come with old age. When death breaks into our lives and steals our innocence, its finality leaves us unnaturally older. There are too many elderly young people. — Sara Shandler

Now you see for yourself that all those who do not at at all times trust God and do not in all their works or sufferings, life and death, trust in His favor, grace and good-will, but seek His favor in other things or in themselves, do not keep this Commandment, and practise real idolatry, even if they were to do the works of all the other Commandments, and in addition had all the prayers, fasting, obedience, patience, chastity, and innocence of all the saints combined. — Martin Luther