Quotes & Sayings About Innocence Of Childhood

The qualities that make for excellence in children's literature can be summed up in a single word: imagination. And imagination as it relates to the child is, to my mind, synonymous with fantasy. Contrary to most of the propaganda in books for the young, childhood is only partly a time of innocence. It is, in my opinion, a time of seriousness, bewilderment, and a good deal of suffering. It's also possibly the best of all times. Imagination for the child is the miraculous, freewheeling device he uses to course his way through the problems of every day ... It's through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. — Maurice Sendak

For long minutes we cried, our grief inconsolable. We mourned the innocence of our childhood love; we grieved as parents of our own children. We agonized in the unfairness of the haphazard and tumultuous world we'd been pushed out into through our mothers' flesh. We wept for the first time, one among many firsts we'd shared, for the sheer emotional pain of bedrock loss. — Larry J. Dunlap

Westcliff thinks that St. Vincent is in love with you."
Evie choked a little and didn't dare look up from her tea. "Wh-why does he think that?"
"He's known St. Vincent from childhood, and can read him fairly well. And Westcliff sees an odd sort of logic in why you would finally be the one to win St. Vincent's heart. He says a girl like you would appeal to ... hmm, how did he put it? ... I can't remember the exact words, but it was something like ... you would appeal to St. Vincent's deepest, most secret fantasy."
Evie felt her cheeks flushing while a skirmish of pain and hope took place in the tired confines of her chest. She tried to respond sardonically. "I should think his fantasy is to consort with as many women as possible."
A grin crossed Lillian's lips. "Dear, that is not St. Vincent's fantasy, it's his reality. And you're probably the first sweet, decent girl he's ever had anything to do with. — Lisa Kleypas

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

Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world
sunk in a deep grave
waste and lonely is its place. In the chords of the bosom blows a deep sadness. I am ready to sink away in drops of dew, and mingle with the ashes.
The distances of memory, the wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys and vain hopes of a whole long life, arise in gray garments, like an evening vapor after the sunset. In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents. What if it should never return to its children, who wait for it with the faith of innocence? — Novalis

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

Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child. — Anthony Horowitz

There's this assumption that all children have the luxury of a childhood where their innocence is always respected and their main occupation is pleasant play - at the age of 18 or 21, they are then thrust into the real world and shown its uglier side, but not before. — Margo Lanagan

To express nostalgia for a childhood we no longer share is to deny the actual significance and humanity of children. — Perry Nodelman

The way in which we manage the business of getting and spending is closely tied to our personal philosophy of living. We begin to develop this philosophy long before we have our first dollar to spend; and unless we are thinking people, our attitude toward money management may continue through the years to be tinged with the ignorance and innocence of childhood. — Catherine Crook De Camp

Something is going to happen, Laura thought. She was going to be kissed. On one side of a kiss was childhood, sunshine,innocence, toys and, on the other, people embracing, darkness, passion and the admittance of a person who, no matter how loved, must always have a quality of otherness, not only to her confidence, but somehow inside her sealing skin. — Margaret Mahy

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 McCammon

Say what you will, dear sister, we do what we do for the promise of our youth. Yet it is always they who scar beneath the points of daggers. — Chris Galford

Don't we all look back in longing, those of us who had happy childhoods? Because the greatest loss we ever know is not the loss of family or place or money, it is the loss of innocence. There is forever a hollow place in our hearts once we realize that darkness rings the campfire. — Carolyn Hart

The notion of this powerful childhood gaze was all the more specious given that adults, in the name of that very spontaneity, subjected chidren to every sort of rehearsed and prepackaged foolishness so that what children were supposed to see and like was no more than the adults' idea of what they imagined having lost themselves, which in turn was probably no more than other versions of childhood recycled by other adults, this cycle of loss building itself up according to the endless demands of nostalgia, so that the older and more rotten the world became, the more this driveling idocy prevailed and this idea of innocence took hold. Grown-ups tried to sweeten the pill, but there was no hiding it, children were the most oppressed creatures on earth. — Jean-Christophe Valtat

I didn't like what that word-'childhood'-conjured up, or rather, I didn't like the way most people use it: that presumption of innocence and starry-eyed wonder. The only good thing about childhood is that no one really remembers it, or rather, that's the only thing about it to like: this forgetting. What else could possibly lie beneath that blissful oblivion but shame: a dark knowledge of that terrible badge of weakness, that inescapable servitude (bearable only thanks to the slow revelation that we could inflict cruelty and evil on the weaker kids), a sickening awareness that just about everything there is to understand was beyond us, made even worse by the lies and inaccuracies that adults feel entitled to spread around, deliberately, or because they don't know any better, about themselves or about the nature of reality? — Jean-Christophe Valtat

The child I was
is just one breath away from me. — Sheniz Janmohamed

Not having enough to eat paralyzes you and keeps you living hour by hour instead of thinking about what you would like to accomplish in a day, week, month, or year. Hunger and poverty steal your childhood and take away your innocence and sense of security. But — Saroo Brierley

This is a feeling that you had, Quentin, she said. Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many people ever experience. That's where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was. — Lev Grossman

Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before - to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love. — Jo Nesbo

There have been times during my life when I have wish to be a boy again, not to have the energy and perfect health of youth, but know once more the innocence and the delight in even the smallest of things that we often fail to feel full strength as the years drift by. What is easy to forget, however, until you apply yourself to the task of memory, is that childhood is a time of fear, as well; some of those fears are reasonable, others irrational and inspired by a sense of powerlessness in a world where often power over others seems to be what drives so many of our fellow human beings. In the swoon of childhood, the possibility of werewolves is as real as the school yard shooter, the idea of vampires as credible as the idea of a terrorist attack, the neighbor possessing paranormal talents as believable as a psychopath. — Dean Koontz

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

Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child's life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming? — Philip Pullman

The whole point about childhood," Domenica went on, "is that it affords us a brief moment of innocence and protection from the pressures of the world. Parents who push their children too hard intrude on that little bit of space. — Alexander McCall Smith

India has known the innocence and insouciance of childhood, the passion
and abandon of youth, and the ripe wisdom of maturity that comes from long experience of pain and pleasure; and over and over a gain she has renewed her childhood and youth and age — Jawaharlal Nehru

Childhood is perhaps the only phase of life when innocence can flourish. But to allow this, parents and others responsible for children's minds needs to construct a protective shelter against the painful and frightening facets of life. They need to stand guard at its door, to let the harsher truths of reality gradually unfold for the child, in a way and at a pace that allows the child to maintain a positive outlook. — Diane Medved

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

...One cannot help but consider the future- what will it be like when all the wild places of the earth have been taken over by civilization, and there is no more room for Indians, Pirates, and Wild Boys? — Christopher Daniel Mechling

I want to talk about the internet, the impact it is having on the innocence of our children, how online pornography is corroding childhood and how, in the darkest corners of the internet, there are things going on that are a direct danger to our children, and that must be stamped out. — David Cameron

I prefer to write books for children instead of reading them. But I do strongly believe in childhood and in respecting childhood innocence. I don't like books for children that deal with adult themes. — Philip Kerr

It actually may be that the shadows of the so-called middle-class utopia always cast heavily on children, particularly in their adolescence. And this is so because the middle class is the proprietor and perpetuator of the category of childhood; living within the economic advantage of not needing children to work (or serve as marriage pawns for continued nobility) leads to a conception of childhood innocence. The child is hidden from the world behind the structural walls of family and education. Middle-class parents take on a heavy burden of seeing it as their core vocation to protect and advance their children. But this projecting and advancing appears to always come with tension as the innocent middle-class child turns into the alien middle-class adolescent.[2] — Andrew Root

[Ending] is partly drawn from a desire to shock the audience, to brutally de-romanticize what many Americans think is happening overseas. And partly drawn from my own childhood: violence and a loss of innocence. But keep in mind that, as a writer, I'm both the criminal and the victim. I'm not trying to get out of anything easy. — Said Sayrafiezadeh

In an age of iPhones and Playstations, it's great to see that somebody's still rocking the bus-on-a-string. — Brandon Stanton

She likened it to a childhood crush, such strong almost obsessive feelings, but more, it had depth. She felt attracted to everything about him, the way he talked, the way he dressed, the words he used, his apparent innocence. Yet he was filled with a deep knowledge of wise insights. He always said the right things, even whe she didn't want to hear them. The darkness lifted and she could suddenly see beyond. When he breezed into the room, he brought clarity and brightness with him. He was walking hope and she could tell that things for her be ... not fantastic or wonderful or happily ever after, but that they could be okay. And that was enough. — Cecelia Ahern

Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood. — Loren Eiseley

He had always tried to treat Havaa as a child and she always went along with it, as though childhood and innocence were fantastical creatures that had died long ago, resurrected only in games of make believe. — Anthony Marra

I read Norman Lock's The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain's original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy - and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America's greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive. — David Oshinsky

He will never be satisfied," writes one biographer ... I know because I suffer from the same disease ... I don't believe for a minute that the flowers ever faded or the stars were ever dimmed in Rimbaud's eyes ... It was the world of men that his weary glance saw things pale and fade. He began by wanting to "see all, feel all, exhaust everything, explore everything, say everything." ... He had no choice of fighting for the rest of his life to hold the ground he had gained or to renounce the struggle utterly. Why could he not have compromised? Because compromise was not in his vocabulary. He was a fanatic from childhood, a person who had to go the whole hog or die. In this lied his purity, his innocence. — Henry Miller

We live in a world of disappointment. You begin with high hopes and the beautiful innocence of childhood but you discover that the world isn't good enough, nor are our lives and nor are we. But there are moments in life when we can have an experience of transcendence, feel part of something larger, or simply our hearts burst inside. — Salman Rushdie

"A son," I say, recalling every detail of the child's perfect face.
Ivory's smile is blinding. "A most unique creature. The first child to be born to two netherlings who've shared a childhood. Wonderland is founded on chaos, madness, and magic. For so long, innocence and imagination have had no place there. As a result, we haven't had children, at least by your world's definition. And because of this, we've lost the ability to dream. But Morpheus experienced those things via you, each time you played together in your dreams. Through your child, Wonderland will thrive with new magic and strength. Our offspring will become true children once more; they will learn to dream again. And all will be right with our world. — A.G. Howard

Parents don't want their children to lose that purity and innocence of childhood. We want to bottle that and hold onto that, but it's impossible. — Pete Docter

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

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind. — Patrick Rothfuss

The age of lost innocence varies for each person. Some lose it when they learn that their childhood fantasies are merely myth, while others lose theirs due to trauma. As adults, we often look down our noses at those who manage to retain their innocence; we scoff at these few as being immature or irresponsible. Could it be that we hide our envy behind the cloudy eyes of our lost innocence? — J.D. Stroube

Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero. — Aldous Huxley

Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied.
Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God's existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel? Do not be fooled by the pretty colour, and do not submit to its beckoning. — Lawrence Hill

COME HOME, TENAR! COME HOME!"
In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face toward home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression? — Anne Frank

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.
It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched. — Audre Lorde

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

Everyone is guilty of something, and everyone still harbors a memory of childhood innocence, no matter how many layers of life wrap around it. Humanity is innocent; humanity is guilty, and both states are undeniably true. — Neal Shusterman

He started touching me. 'How old are you?' He ran his hands over my nose, my mouth, my eyes. I was paralysed. 'Nine. What about you?' 'Nine.' 'When's your birthday?' 'The twelfth of September. And yours?' 'The Twentieth of November.' 'What's your name?' 'Michele. Michele Amitrano. What year are you in at school?' 'The fourth. What about you?' 'The fourth.' 'Same.' 'Same' 'I'm thirsty.' I gave him the bottle — Niccolo Ammaniti

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

I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "maneater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded. — Carl Jung

And so it is becomes important to protect the innocence in children, to prolong their understanding of the two worlds, because innocence like any other thing does not have a lastingness and so the idea is to bring them up beyond the concepts of truth and falsehood, leave it to time for it is a valuable teacher and ensure that they come out of it, all of it unscathed. — Chirag Tulsiani

That was how his pen finally designed his sculpture; in the center the weak,
confused, arrogant, soon to be destroyed young man holding cup a loft, behind him the idyllic child, clear-eyed, munching his grapes, symbol of joy
; between them the tiger skin. The Bacchus, hollow within himself, flabby, reeling, already old; the Satyr,
eternally young and gay, symbol of man's childhood and naughty innocence — Irving Stone

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief - how could they ever be other than what they are? — Ian McEwan

So often survivors have had their experiences denied, trivialized, or distorted. Writing is an important avenue for healing because it gives you the opportunity to define your own reality. You can say: This did happen to me. It was that bad. It was the fault & responsibility of the adult. I was - and am - innocent. The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass & Laura Davis — Ellen Bass

You get to relive your childhood when you have a baby and you see these toys and these books you read when you were little - the innocence that you are able to maintain because you have to find that again in order to connect with your child keeps you in a special state of mind. — Idina Menzel

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

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

We have to listen to the child we once were, the child who still exists inside us. That child understands magic moments. We can stifle its cries, but we cannot silence its voice.The child we once were is still there. Blessed are the children, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.If we are not reborn if we cannot learn to look at life with the innocence and the enthusiasm o childhood it makes no sense to go on living. — Paulo Coelho

Believe in Eternity, believe in childhood, believe that the beauty of innocence lives on and on and on. I know it does. — Yann W. Tanoe

What time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life? — Leo Tolstoy

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

Every time we focus on someone else's darkness, we are blocking our own view of the light. We think the person we are involved with has attacked us or has withheld love from us, when they really haven't. We focus on their guilt instead of their innocence. Frequently people are just being themselves and we start projecting our own childhood dramas onto them, pushing away the very love we want so much. — Marianne Williamson

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

Not since Lord of the Flies has a novelist written with such perceptiveness about the potential for harm that lurks within the innocence of childhood. — Paula Sharp

Suffer barbaric childhood to give and receive remorselessly; civilized age learns to protect what it has, to neither give nor accept freely, to trust it's own mistrust above faith, and intriguing others above the innocent. Intrigue, after all, is rational, something the mind can sink it's teeth into, and defeat it with the good digestion of reason, a hopeless prospect for the toothless heart, and God only knows what innocence will do next. — William Gaddis

I was thinking of how, when we think of loss in our life, how our sense of 'home' was the first thing to go. You know, we lose that place of childhood innocence, of feeling protected. And so many of us spend the rest of our lives trying to reclaim that place called home, that life made simple again. — Tabitha Vohn

The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals. — Clint Eastwood

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

The poet believed that 'Beauty' first entered the world not at its creation, nor with the first garden, the first sunrise, the birth of the first man and woman and their first sexual act. The poet believed that 'Beauty' entered the world the day the first child blushed. — Roman Payne

There were the years - years of childhood and innocence - when I had believed that carminative meant - well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life - a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend. — Aldous Huxley

The girl looks out the window, watching the gentle, familiar blue sky fade into darkness. The stars come out, slowly at first and then all together, diamond-bright, each one a new world to discover.
But no matter how long the girl looks, she feels nothing. Puzzled, she looks for the girl who wanted to be an explorer, the girl who wanted to learn deep-sea diving and mountain-climbing, the girl who wanted to travel the stars. But she can't find her. That girl died when her parents did, in a little shop in the slums of November. And now she has no soul left to shatter.
She closes the shade over the window. — Amie Kaufman

It seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence. — Evelyn Waugh

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age. The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Through private investment capitalism kept raising the productivity of labor to new heights. Parents were able to earn enough so their offspring did not have to join the work force at an early age. This produced something unique in history: Childhood, a time when the young could experience the innocence of play and opportunity of schooling before entering the world of work. — Richard Ebeling

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be. — Robert Frost

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