Quotes & Sayings About Innocence Lost

Last night I walked for hours. It was as if I wanted to get lost down some unknown street. To get absolutely and happily lost. But there are moments when we can't, when we don't know how to lose our way. Even if we always go in the wrong direction. Even if we lose all our points of reference. Even if it begins to grow late and we feel the weight of morning as we advance. There are times when no matter how we try to find out what we don't know, we can't lose our way. And perhaps we long for the time when we could be lost. The time when all the streets were new. — Alejandro Zambra

An adult is one who has lost the grace, the freshness, the innocence of the child, who is no longer capable of feeling pure joy, who makes everything complicated, who spreads suffering everywhere, who is afraid of being happy, and who, because it is easier to bear, has gone back to sleep. The wise man is a happy child. — Arnaud Desjardins

The experts are right, he thought. Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone. Their heels made a ringing sound on the pavement and the rain splashed from the gutterings above. A fine ending to an evening that had started with brave hope, with innocence. ("Don't Look Now") — Daphne Du Maurier

Something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was the childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that Man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places, who do not have to endure war's savagery, will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it. — Eugene B. Sledge

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

How can you think that anything will not happen, when you know that it may happen to many men, and has happened to many? That is a noble verse, and worthy of a nobler source than the stage: - "What one hath suffered may befall us all." That man has lost his children: you may lose yours. That man has been convicted: your innocence is in peril. We are deceived and weakened by this delusion, when we suffer what we never foresaw that we possibly could suffer: but by looking forward to the coming of our sorrows we take the sting out of them when they come. — Seneca.

There are some things that once you've lost, you never get back. Innocence is one. Love is another. I guess childhood is a third. — John Marsden

I feel I lost my innocence to cancer. — Delta Goodrem

Coming to the master is coming in search of your innocence, in search of your lost childhood, in search of your originality ... in search of your individuality, in search of freedom. — Rajneesh

There is no place for innocence on the battlefield. — Jocelyn Murray

I lost my innocence at age eight, so I decided to do the same to as many young girls as I could. — Pedro

The Recovered Thing is not quite the same as the Thing-never-lost. It is often more precious. As Grace, recovered by repentance, is not the same as primitive Innocence, but is not necessarily a poorer or worse state. — J.R.R. Tolkien

I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom. — George Will

Most survivors grew up too fast. Their vulnerable child-selves got lost in the need to protect and deaden themselves. Reclaiming the inner child is part of the healing process. Often the inner child holds information and feelings for the adult. Some of these feelings are painful; others are actually fun. The child holds the playfulness and innocence the adult has had to bury. — Laura Davis

While the innocent yearned to lose their innocence, those who had already done so in turn envied the innocent, and knew grief in what they had lost. Between the two, no exchange of truths was possible. — Steven Erikson

The patch of lawn before it had relapsed into a hayfield; but to the left an overgrown box-garden full of dahlias and rusty rose-bushes encircled a ghostly summer-house of trellis-work that had once been white, surmounted by a wooden Cupid who had lost his bow and arrow but continued to take ineffectual aim. — Edith Wharton

The price of this story was the audience's innocence. — Tom Rob Smith

Taxonomy, also called systematics, is the science-based hierarchical classification of the world's species. The area had traditionally been an obscure academic discipline dominated by erudite and professional dons who would memorize and interpret thousands of Latin species names. Advances seldom made the newspapers and caustic disputes lingered in the dust scientific literature for generations. That academic innocence would be lost forever when precise taxonomic recognition of species and subspecies came to be the basis for protection under the Endangered Species Act. — Stephen J. O'Brien

Pop music has been exhausted. The innocence has been exhausted. I think we've lost the ability to be blown away by music. — Brian Wilson

They come to us, these restless dead,
Shrouds woven from the words of men,
With trumpets sounding overhead
(The walls of hope have grown so thin
And all our vaunted innocence
Has withered in this endless frost)
That promise little recompense
For all we risk, for all we've lost ... — Mira Grant

He made sure his tone remained casual. He was trying to keep his son unaware of the encroaching alien invasion for as long as he could, be it another day or another hour. Once innocence was lost it was never regained.

So he took his son fishing and strolled along the river and pretended as though the galaxy wasn't on fire. — G.S. Jennsen

Halt?" said Gilan, realization dawning. "You're not seasick are you?"
No," Halt said shortly, not trusting himself beyond one syllable.
Probably need a bite if breakfast to settle your stomach," Svengal said helpfully. "Gte something solid inside you."
Had ... breakfast." This time Halt managed three syllables-but with some difficulty, Svengal affected no notice.
Cabbage is god. Especially pickled cabbage. Sits on the gut nicely," he said. "Goes well with a nice piece of greasy bacon. You should try that if you ... "
But before he could finish, Halt lurched toward the ship's rail and hung over it. Dreaful noises were torn from him. Svengal, still affecting a look of innocence, turned to Gilan, hands spread and eyes wide.
What it the world is he looking for? Has he lost something, do you think? — John Flanagan

What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. One needn't be, shouldn't be, reduced to a puppy. If you wish to tell me that the city offers galleries, I'll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it lasts; but I'll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away. These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present. — Annie Dillard

SoulsThat we might break these molds
And free our restless souls
Start to believe
That we can rise above
Our pettiness and love
Like we ain't loved before
Free on this earth
As the surf that rolls
And crashes on the shore
And hey now don't run and hide
Your little heart away
If it's gone
We'll sure never find it
Pining for lost innocence
Tantalisingly I saw
Our shadows moving through the door
Traces from a different time
When I was yours and you were truly mine
All mine — David Gray

Children used to be unknowing and innocent when it came to certain issues in life. But that innocence has been lost in today's electronic environment. Kids are exposed to ideas and content their minds and emotions are not ready to handle. And under the onslaught of this corrupt world with its wrong concepts, wrong desires, wrong deeds, and wrong attitudes, children come under all sorts of negative influences that end up bringing serious problems into the home. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

You lost your innocence when you grew up, all right, everyone knew that, but did you have to lose your hope, as well? — Stephen King

Where was my guardian angel when I needed him most? If only I knew. — A. Esquivel

You know what I miss the most about my youth? My gullibility. It's nice believing in everything and everyone. It makes you feel secure, but be strong and depend more on yourself and you'll be ready for disappointments. That's the best advice I can offer you. — V.C. Andrews

lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can't tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treasure this part of me; whoever loves me loves me with this in it. — Kay Redfield Jamison

We must face the fact that we are on the brink of times when man may be able to magnify his intellectual and inventive capability, just as in the nineteenth century he used machines to magnify his physical capacity. Again, as then, our innocence is lost. And again, of course, the innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. The loss demands attention, not denial. — Christopher Alexander

It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth. — Alberto Manguel

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever. — Susan Hill

But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a sacred 'Yes.' For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred 'Yes' is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It was a warm summer night of a kiss at first. Gentle. Romanic. It matched the dreaminess he'd seen in her eyes when she talked about lovers bathed in starlight.

She couldn't know what she did to him when she had peered up at him, a mixture of sweet innocence and curious desire all at once. He had waged a war within himself. He should leave, he'd thought. If nothing else in his life remained true, he was a gentleman. And gentlemen did not ravish young innocents in their guardian's library.
But when her milky skin flushed pink, he'd lost the battle. Even their talk of consequences had done nothing to tamp down the need that consumed him. For just a taste.

Just a taste. — Brianna Labuskes

UG staff is patching up wargs, and all surviving Guardians are tied up," Wraith said, "But they could probably use some medical attention. Especially the one dipshit with the idiotic Mohawk. He lost a lot of blood." "Because you ate him," Sin said wryly. Wraith blinked with exaggerated innocence. "Fighting makes me hungry. — Larissa Ione

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

Three. I had just made my first, second, and third kill. Before I had even obtained my mage's robes. I bent over and vomited into the grass. There was no pride, no justice, just the appalling sense that I had lost my innocence. That I was a monster. — Rachel E. Carter

As one sees a river pass into the ocean, lose itself in it, its water for a time distinguished from that of the sea, till it gradually becomes transformed into the same sea, and possesses all its qualities; so was my soul lost in God, who communicated to it His qualities, having drawn it out of all that it had of its own. Its life is an inconceivable innocence, not known or comprehended of those who are still shut up in themselves or only live for themselves. — Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

And she felt the beauty in the music now, drank it in with tears streaming down her face. Never had she been so naked in worship before her Creator, allowing the adoration to bleed out her very fingertips onto the strings, playing her heart's cry for every single lost soul, for the loss of innocence every generation to come would possess as a result of what happened at the killing fields of Auschwitz. — Kristy Cambron

Childhood has been idealised as a lost garden paradise to which we can never return. We are excluded from this world of carelessness, innocence and unity. But the imaginary kingdom is nothing more than a projection of adult ideas and concerns onto the image, an expression of our own yearnings. By photographing children alone, divorced from any social setting, I allow them to exist on their own ... I am exploring the equivocal connection between self and world. — Loretta Lux

To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost."
So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions."
An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes. — Anne Rice

Whether we knew many who died on September 11 or personally knew none, we all lost something on that day. Innocence. Security. A trust that our homeland would always be safe. — Bob Taft

Nuclear scientists lost their innocence when we used the atom bomb for the very first time. So we could argue computer scientists lost their innocence in 2009 when we started using malware as an offensive attack weapon. — Mikko Hypponen

One of the things I loved about my childhood was that I didn't feel like I lost my innocence too young, like some children these days. — Danielle De Niese

I know why I'm obsessed with her. She's the innocence I've lost. As I was going dark, she was getting nothing but brighter. — Karen Marie Moning

When we think about a child, which things attracts more towards them. what is the most appealing things about children. Is their physical beauty, their openess and loving nature, their innate humour ? according to me its their innocence which we all lost.
This is the quality which attract most to love kids, their innocence. Innocence is like free from the hurdles of this world,do whatever you want to do, not giving attention on what people will think, enjoy life and etc. children are so innocent that they don't care about the world. — Joann Kinlaw

I'm mesmerized, lost, and found again. By bright blue eyes, little lips, and a soft cry. By dark hair and perfect ears. By his untouched innocence, unconditional trust, and love: all three given without asking the first time I look into his eyes — K. Bromberg

The truth is that Leon, like a lot of those-maybe everyone-who trips on acid, never really came back. he recovered but he was never the same guy again. He had lost something-innocence of hell. Acid presses a little button in your mind that should never be pressed — Craig Ferguson

Wonder is a very subtle, precious emotion, often lost in the gross hustle and bustle of modern life. When we feel wonder, we are immediately reminded of the purity and innocence of our childhood. Then, everything was magical and mysterious. Magic should help us relive that wonder. — Doug Henning

Most people are born the day they arrive in this world. They take their first breath, open their eyes, take in their surroundings and then they scream. It's the same for most. The moment they are held in their parent's arms is the moment they truly begin to live. Not me. I was born on the 4th February, 1999 in so many different ways. In the morning, I went from being a girl to a woman. I lost my innocence in a way not many others have lost theirs before. Then I went home and lost my youth. My parents have turned their backs on me and I have happily walked away, and even though that walk was painful, it was also freeing. My wings have spread and finally, I feel like I am soaring. — Victoria L. James

When innocence ends, pleasure begins. Chloe Thurlow — Chloe Thurlow

But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day becasue it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness; the wonder, fear, and lonliness. How I lost myself.
I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found. — Amy Tan

Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. — Michael J. Sandel

To the former child migrants, who came to Australia from a home far away, led to believe this land would be a new beginning, when only to find it was not a beginning, but an end, an end of innocence - we apologise and we are sorry. To the mothers who lost the maternal right to love and care for their child - we apologise, and we are sorry. — Malcolm Turnbull

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. — Graham Greene

When I started off in music, I started with a real innocence, a real love for the instrument, the writing the songs, the playing the songs and the sharing and the recording and experimenting. It was exciting. Then, this thing called success came, and something happened at some point where I became disenchanted, and I lost the innocence. — Damien Rice

If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality? — Germaine Greer

I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not. — Neil Gaiman

His eyes were dimmed with tears, and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost. — James Joyce

I felt sort of sad that I couldn't remember the last time, before tonight, that I'd paid such close attention to the sky. It felt like that must be some kind of sign that I'd lost my innocence and grown up without even realizing it. — Tara Altebrando

At times one wanders, doubting the facts, even when one has discovered the secrets of the good life. To be sure, my solution is not the ideal.
But when you don't like your own life, when you know that you must change lives, you don't have any choice, do you? What can one do to become
another?Impossible. One would have to cease being anyone, forget oneself for someone else, at least once.But how? Don't bear down too hard on me.
I am like that old beggar who wouldn't let go of my hand one day on a cafe terrace: Oh, sir,he said, its not just that I am no good, but you lose
track of the light.Yes, we have lost track of the light, the mornings, the holy innocence of those who forgive themselves. — Albert Camus

Dearest Charles
I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start ... I am never quite alone. Members of my family keep turning up and collecting luggage and going away again, but the white raspberries are ripe. I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits. Love or what you will. S. — Evelyn Waugh

Innocence crafts its own demise. — F.T. McKinstry

I lost my innocence very young and it had nothing to do with sex. — Jennifer Elisabeth

RICH I'm lamenting. I've lost my innocence.
CROMWELL You lost that some time ago. If you've only just noticed, it can't have been very important to you. — Robert Bolt

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. — Thomas Paine

I think the only reason I never lost my mind is that I knew I was innocent. That wasn't a happy thought, so the dementors couldn't suck it out of me...but it kept me sane and knowing who I am...helped me keep my powers... — J.K. Rowling

I challenged myself to write/direct a romantic comedy. People trash talk the rom com, but it's one of the oldest cinematic genres, with stellar origins like Twentieth Century and Trouble in Paradise. I think as audiences lost their innocence, the genre lost its suspense. To create suspense, you need obstacles, so I gave my couple an obstacle that very few people ever overcome: their own behavior and their past. — Leslye Headland

A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and reknitting of remembered words, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence, and in the shadow it casts over our present world, we begin to understand what we only intuited in our naivete-that while all else may vanish, love is our one eternity. — Vaddey Ratner

The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes. — Vladimir Nabokov

Innocence is a strange thing. For those who held it within them, the experienced people in the world flew to them like moths to a flame. Yet, instead of bursting into cinders, they smothered the flame and showed the candle just how dark the world could be. Once that innocence was lost, there was no turning back. No way back to the light of the normal world. It became an addiction. Pain, domination, submission, and degradation would be constant yearnings for the newly initiated." ~Lexie Syrah — Lexie Syrah

No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden. — Elizabeth Bowen

You can be innocent again. It's not true, what they say, that you can never get it back. You can. It's only that most folk cannot be bothered. — Catherynne M Valente

Dean Owen did what a lot of reporters seem to have forgotten how to do these days, he asked the people who were there that awful day what they saw and how they felt. This is a must-read for anyone who wants a better understanding of what happened on the weekend that America lost its innocence. A terrific read. — Bob Schieffer

The person who takes power will never be happy with those things they gain. They have lost their essential balance and innocence. And without innocence, nothing can further, as they say in the I Ching. — Frederick Lenz

Love cannot exist in a heart that has lost the meek dignity of innocence. — Ann Radcliffe

The First Flowers
Beside the brook
Toward the willows,
During these days
So many yellow flowers have opened
Their eyes into gold.
I have long since lost my innocence, yet a memory
Touches my depth, the golden hours of morning, and gazes
Brilliantly upon me out of the eyes of flowers.
I was going to pick flowers;
Now I leave them all standing
And walk home, an old man. — Hermann Hesse

There is another more subtle way in which the innocence of childhood is lost: when the child is infected with the desire to become somebody. Contemplate the crowds of people who are striving might and main to become, not what Nature intended them to be- musicians, cooks, mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, inventors- but "somebody": to become successful, famous, powerful; to become something that will bring not quiet and self-fulfillment, but self-glorification and self-expansion — Anthony De Mello

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.' Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost. — Matt Haig

When he talked, there was a sort of mushy sound to his pronunciation that was charming because one sensed that it betrayed not so much an impediment in his speech as a quality of his soul, a sort of vestige of early childhood innocence that he had never lost. Each consonant he could not pronounce appeared to be another instance of a hardness of which he was incapable. — Marcel Proust

Having released the wartime images he was carrying in his unconscious, he became worried that he would now be at their mercy, plagued by them in day as well as by night. But what he found was just the opposite. While he did retrieve the horrible images, he rediscovered a lost innocence as well. The beauty of the jungle, the glistening white sands of the Vietnamese beaches, and the intense greens of the rice paddies at dawn all filtered back to him. Not only did he remember his trauma, he remembered himself before his trauma. — Mark Epstein

It is the custom to sneer at the modern apartment-house, television, big-city Christmas, with its commercial taint ... office parties, artificial ... Christmas trees ... but future generations in search of their lost Christmases may well remember its innocence; yes, and its beauty, too. — Paul Gallico

Soul murder, the psychiatrists call it, the sexual violation of children. Unimaginably small boys. Boys whose heads do not reach to their father's waists. Girls who are no more than infants. Boys and girls whose lives are ineradicably violated. Whose trust and innocence are lost to them forever. (208) — Robert Goolrick

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

Innocense is lost, where innocence is found, at birth. — PSM

Cosette, by learning that she was beautiful, lost the grace of not knowing it; an exquisite grace, for beauty heightened by artlessness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as dazzling innocence, going on her way, and holding in her hand, all unconsciousness, the key of a paradise. — Victor Hugo

After thee accumulation of too much history we have lost our innocence, we cannot easily believe in any explanations. We describe rather than feel, we touch rather than explore, we lust rather than adore. — Genesis P-Orridge

When I was a child, I used to look at the sky and wonder how were stars fixed on the canopy and why didn't they fall on Earth. I also wondered why they disappeared in day time. When I grew up, all my questions got answered, but I lost my innocence. — Tarif Naaz

Innocence, Once Lost, Can Never Be Regained. Darkness, Once Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost. — John Milton

Political writers argue in regard to the love of liberty with the same philosophy that philosophers do in regard to the state of nature; by the things they see they judge of things very different which they have never seen, and they attribute to men a natural inclination to slavery, on account of the patience with which the slaves within their notice carry the yoke; not reflecting that it is with liberty as with innocence and virtue, the value of which is not known but by those who possess them, though the relish for them is lost with the things themselves. I know the charms of your country, said Brasidas to a satrap who was comparing the life of the Spartans with that of the Persepolites; but you can not know the pleasures of mine. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I would have stayed forever within the garden of Re-mose's childhood, but time is a mother's enemy. — Anita Diamant

With kids, what you see is what you get. There's just truth in their innocence that we as adults have lost and will never regain. — Michelle Figley

That little girl was dead and in her place stood a cold-blooded killer. — Reyna Pryde

It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me. — William Faulkner

It happened so fast - so abruptly. An innocence I'd clung to was lost in that instant. — Nic Sheff

If being premenstrual is "innocence," does that make those of us with periods guilty? And this really gets to the heart of the matter: These concerns aren't about lost innocence; they're about lost girlhood. The virginity movement doesn't want women to be adults.

Despite the movement's protestations about how this focus on innocence or preserving virginity is just a way of protecting girls, the truth is, it isn't a way to desexualize them. It simply positions their sexuality as "good" - worth talking about, protecting, and valuing - and women's sexuality, adult sexuality, as bad and wrong. The (perhaps) unintended consequences of this focus is that girl's sexuality is sexualized and fetishized even further. — Jessica Valenti

I lost my innocence with Johnny Cash. I used to watch the 'Johnny Cash Show' on television in Wangaratta when I was about 9 or 10 years old. At that stage I had really no idea about rock n' roll. I watched him, and from that point I saw that music could be an evil thing - a beautiful, evil thing. — Nick Cave

Many Americans have lost confidence in the way our criminal courts assess guilt and innocence. Whatever one thinks of the verdicts, the recent trials of O.J. Simpson, Erik and Lyle Menendez, and various defendants in preschool molestation cases have been lengthy, lawyer-dominated soap operas in which the search for truth has been subordinated to the manipulation of procedures. — James Q. Wilson

My name is Mila, and this is my journey.
There are so many places where I could begin the story. I could start in the town where I grew up, in Kryvicy, on the banks of the Servac River, in the district of Miadziel. I could begin when I was eight years old, on the day my mother died, or when I was twelve, and my father fell beneath the wheels of the neighbour's truck. But I think I should begin my story here, in the Mexican desert, so far from my home in Belarus. This is where I lost my innocence. This is where my dreams died. — Tess Gerritsen

The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you'd be ruined. Overdosed on information. — Chuck Palahniuk