Loss Of Innocence Quotes

“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“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

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

“Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk

“Perhaps he simply assumed: a bitterness of habit, of boy after boy trained for music and medicine, and unleashed for murder.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“...I live with regrets - the bittersweet loss of innocence - the red track of the moon upon the lake - the inability to return and do it again...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“The girl was holding out her hand, bit I could only give a pathetic shrug.
I had nothing to give her. I'd finally faded away.”
― Scott Heim

“I'm lying in my room listening to the birds outside. I used to think they sang because they were happy. But then I learned on a nature show they're really showing off. Trying to lure in some other bird so they can mate with it. Or let the other birds know not to get too close to their turf. I wish I never watched that show, because now all I think about is what those pretty sounds mean. And how they're not pretty at all.”
― Jo Knowles, Jumping Off Swings

“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, This Shattered World

“It's the map of my childhood, my sadness, my Eden, my hell and home.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of mans heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“. . . for it was a new thing to see Meg blushing and talking about admiration, lovers, and things of that sort, and Jo felt as if during that fortnight her sister had grown up amazingly, and was drifting away from her into a world where she could not follow.”
― Lousia May Alcott, Little Woman

“The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilisation of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty. The Schlegels were certainly the poorer for the loss of Wickham Place. It had helped to balance their lives, and almost to counsel them. Nor is their ground-landlord spiritually the richer. He has built flats on its site, his motor-cars grow swifter, his exposures of Socialism more trenchant. But he has spilt the precious distillation of the years, and no chemistry of his can give it back to society again.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Three men and they all took something from me: my affection, my promise, and my innocence. What has love given me...? Nothing. Nothing but pain.”
― Jenny Knipfer, Harvest Moon

“All humankind is born of the same inner goodness and fundamental ruthlessness as all the other creatures of nature. Man can never totally divorce himself from the beast that comprises part of his essential nature. It is not that our inner natures are entirely self-centered or completely filled with goodness. We can choose to make moral or immoral choices.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“How fast everything had seemed, and how special and different and sophisticated and rich. All the things that had struck me at first—the odd formality that would have been unfriendliness at home, the attitudinizing, the orgies of talk, the tension and snobbery—seemed to make life so complicated. But then you acquire a taste for complicated things, nothing simpler will satisfy you. Go back home, and it's a let-down, there's something missing, everything is slower, duller, the conversation makes you want to bang your head against the wall.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Something to Write Home About

“Grisha, a fat, solemn little person of seven, was standing by the kitchen door listening and peeping through the keyhole.”
― Anton Pavlovich Chejov

“No mi kršćani upućeni smo po središtu našega Creda - 'mučen pod Poncijem Pilatom' - u povijest u kojoj je bilo razapinjanja i mučenja, u kojoj se plakalo i tako rijetko ljubilo. I nikakav od povijesti udaljeni mit, nikakav Platonovi idejni Bog, nikakva gnostička soteriologija i nikakav apstraktni govor o povijesnosti naše egzistencije ne mogu nam vratiti onu nedužnost koju smo u toj povijesti izgubili.”
― Johann Baptist Metz, Memoria passionis: Ein provozierendes Gedächtnis in pluralistischer Gesellschaft

“I betrayed my body sleeping with you. I gave up my integrity, giving you pieces of me you did not deserve.”
― Noah Sammak

“At the end of the night, I hug my boys and tell them I love them. The words come out easy and the hugs linger with the knowledge of not knowing when the next hug will be given. We punch each other's chests after hugs, lightly, before getting into our separate cabs or cars and speeding off toward a few hours of sleep before our separate airport trips. From the back of my car, underneath waves of glowing neon lights flooding into the windows, I think about how often me and the boys I knew and know were taught to love each other through expressions of violence. How, if that is our baseline for love, it might be impossible for us to love anyone well, including ourselves.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

“And that is why they let us down so badly.
For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“And that is why they let us down so badly.
For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.

While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger . . . We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“What has Kantorek [their teacher] written to you?' Muller asks him [Kropp].

He laughs. 'We are the Iron Youth.'

We all three smile bitterly . . .

Yes, that's what they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Kantorek would say that we stood on the threshold of life. And so it would seem. We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are able to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a wasteland.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Cheryl Peters had already told me that the family next door, the third house I'd gone to, had also heard me and not opened the door. "They have two children," she said, matter-of-factly. But I was a child, too. Or at least I had been.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“He did not steal, he merely used. And every one of us at times does the same: one man with regard to government timber, and another with regard to a sum belonging to his employer, while a third defrauds his children for the sake of an actress, and a fourth robs his peasantry for the sake of smart furniture or a carriage.
What can one do when one is surrounded on every side with roguery, and everywhere there are insanely expensive restaurants, masked balls, and dances to the music of gipsy bands?
To abstain when every one else is indulging in these things, and fashion commands, is difficult indeed.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“When a boy becomes a man, he must choose between the life he was given and who he wants to be. Remember who you want to be.”
― Michael C. Haymes

“Childhood tiptoed out.
Silence slid in like a bolt.”
― Arundhati Roy , The God of Small Things

“We understand loss. And we know that it is the worst kind of powerlessness"- Atrius”
― Carissa Broadbent, Slaying the Vampire Conqueror