Innocence Lost Quotes

“In the 1950s kids lost their innocence.
They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term ---the generation gap.

In the 1960s, kids lost their authority.
It was a decade of protest---church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it.

In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self.
Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion....It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference.

In the 1980s, kids lost their hope.
Stripped of innocence, authority and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.

In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world.

In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore.”
― Ravi Zacharias, Recapture the Wonder

“O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.”
― William Blake, Songs of Experience

“I want you to tell your aunt that she must convince your uncle to get a telephone installed. They are too old to live out there with no way to communicate with the outside world.”
― R. Gerry Fabian, Just Out Of Reach

“That little girl was dead and in her place stood a cold-blooded killer.”
― Reyna Pryde, Unique: A New Breed

“Who is that blond child laughing as he runs after his colored marbles? [my marbles]

It's me

And who is the poet writing this poem?

That blond child who laughed as he ran after his colored marbles”
― Pierre Albert-Birot, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology

“Reunions are the first day of school all over again. Time casts away familiarity and replaces it with warm confusion. Seeing how the years have frayed the friends of our youth reminds us that we too have irrevocably changed and can never return to a state of innocence again.”
― Stewart Stafford

“You speak of love? Love is a sickness that causes men and women to do stupid things, the sorts of things that leave them sad and broken when the fever passes.”
― Danielle Teller, All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella’s Stepmother

“There is no place for innocence in this world.”
― Anthony Neilson, Neilson Plays:1: Normal; Penetrator; Year of the Family; Night Before Christmas; Censor

“Idolized my innocence,
Stole it from me in the end

Now I’m wide awaken and still paying for the poison they sold me.”
― Sara Bareilles, The Blessed Unrest

“It's a simple question;
Do we bear monsters?
Or do we create them?”
― Anthony Neilson, Neilson Plays:1: Normal; Penetrator; Year of the Family; Night Before Christmas; Censor

“It began as a flicker in her mind. Just a glint in a place still ruled by childish thoughts and fantasies. Yet that single spark ignited something, and the ensuing flame rushed forth with such speed and intensity that she was momentarily frightened it would swallow her whole. But there was no fighting it. It indeed devoured her, as well as everything else in its path. In the brief passage of an instant, the young girl’s tiny form was filled to the brim with brilliant, searing, blinding rage.”
― Obie Williams, The Crimes of Orphans

“They were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed they had, and were all bruised and pouty. Well, if they would not go to school they must have there education. And education they had had.”
― Anthony Burgess

“I can only hope that (God) will judge us
not as the monsters we have become
but as the children
we once were.”
― Anthony Neilson, Plays 1: Normal / Penetrator / Year of the Family / The Night Before Christmas / The Censor

“But to them, I knew, I was a go-between, they thought of me in terms of another person. When Lord Trimingham wanted Marian, when Marian wanted Ted, they turned to me. The confidences Marian had made me had been forced out of her. With Ted it was different. He felt he owed me something - me, Leo: the tribute of one nature to another.

I did not like to think of him giving up the things he cared for and sleeping on the ground. I could not believe it was softer than the beds at Brandham; besides, he might be killed. There was a lot of him to be killed, and what there was he carried about with him, it was not spread out over houses and parklands.”
― L P Hartley, The Go-Between

“Great thinkers proffered that man is born broken and he spends a lifetime healing. All men share a germinal sense of innocence, but life leads us into our vices. Temptation surrounds us, and we willingly march into the den of iniquity. We rationalize and attempt to justify commission of great sins.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster

“In a big city, there are always fires somewhere. And there are always crimes somewhere, too. God, despairing of burning away crime with fire , perhaps distributed crime and fire in equal quantities. Thus crime is never consumed by fire, while innocence can be burned up. That's why insurance companies prosper. My guilt, however--in order that it might become a pure thing immune to fire, must not my innocence first pass through the fire?”
― Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors

“Hear me Constanta: no one on this wretched Earth is innocent. Not you, not me, not those children.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“when we
were birds,
we knew
how to ride
the wind's whims,
to tire ourselves
with flight,
to sleep at night
like stones.”
― Jenny Noble Anderson, But Still She Flies: Poems and Paintings

“Can I scream at monsters? I really wish I knew that it was monsters who said I love you before they broke my flesh to satisfy theirs. Some one should of mentented that monster dont just live under my bed, they walk around leaving egg shells around my hell that is disguised as home. My monsters didnt have to break in, the door was always left ajar. To answer the question, the monsters always win, so dont scream.”
― A. Starr

“The innocence about life ends when one bloods or is bloodied for it”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom

“Keep your heart open and always encourage creative imagination in kids. They will likely grow up soon enough and become mindless drones. Do not be a catalyst to this loss of innocence.”
― Shayne Neal, From Misery to Happiness: A poetic journey through love, loss, and second chances.

“Self-awareness is a good which still can, in some cases, steal one's innocence - for it is often much worse to know better without the discipline to do better.”
― Criss Jami

“Badalle?'
'Saddic - these things - they're toys-'
He looked up at her, the colour leaving his face. Showing her, bared and raw, wretched astonishment. Then that shattered, and she could see he was about to cry.
I'm sorry. I'd ... forgotten.
She watched as Saddic's attention returned to the collection of objects spilled out on the ground before him. He reached out as if to touch one - a bundle of twine and feathers - and then snatched back his hand. 'Toys,' he whispered. 'They're toys.”
― Steven Erikson, The Crippled God

“Badalle?'
'Saddic - these things - they're toys.'
He looked up at her, the colour leaving his face. Showing her, bared and raw, wretched astonishment. Then that shattered, and she could see he was about to cry.
I'm sorry. I'd ... forgotten.
She watched as Saddic's attention returned to the collection of objects spilled out on the ground before him. He reached out as if to touch one - a bundle of twine and feathers - and then snatched back his hand. 'Toys,' he whispered. 'They're toys.”
― Steven Erikson, The Crippled God

“Everyone who lived past childhood innocence would have done something evil.”
― Udayakumar D.S., Fearless and Free: How One Man Changed my Life ǀ Self-help story on life, love and making a fresh start

“The walls were now witnessing an innocent girl cry.”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Tajrish

“As the pavement expanded, his innocence was slowly buried under asphalt, swallowed as all childhoods eventually are. But the earth protested, bending and warping the pavement with roots and blades of grass that pushed up through the cracks, and he learned that wildness was not something that can ever be tamed.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“Come, speak to me of times gone by.
Remind me of our carefree youth.
Recall with me those nights we sang
and laughed and thought we knew the truth.

Come, speak to my of times gone by.
Remind me of your dancing feet.
Recall with me those days we knew
the world was ours, and life was sweet.”
― Susan Noyes Anderson

“I washed her with slow, careful gestures, first letting her squat in the tub, then asking her to stand up: I still have in my ears the sound of the dripping water, and the impression that the copper of the tub had a consistency not different from Lila's flesh, which was smooth, solid, calm. I had a confusion of feelings and thoughts: embrace her, weep with her, kiss her, pull her hair, pretend to sexual experience and instruct her in a learned voice, distancing her with words just at the moment of greatest closeness. But in the end there was only the hostile thought that I was washing her, from her hair to the soles of her feet, early in the morning, just so Stefano could sully her in the course of the night. I imagined her naked as she was at that moment, entwined with her husband, in the bed in the new house, while the train clattered under their windows and his violent flesh entered her with a sharp blow, like the cork pushed by the palm into the neck of a wine bottle. And it suddenly seemed to me that the only remedy against the pain I was feeling, that I would feel, was to find a corner secluded enough so that Antonio could do to me, at the same time, the exact same thing.”
― Elena Ferrante; translated by Ann Goldstein, My Brilliant Friend

“She sees it coming. Like a rushing train. Like tear gas in a crowd. In the eternal seconds before it happens, she's hearing the whistle, seeing the hand reach for the grenade, and she can't stop it happening. Everything in her holds itself sharp and tense in expectation of catastrophe; everything is steel tracks, stinging eyes, bone waiting to be compressed. It's happening and she can't stop it happening; Evelyn by her knowledge tree and that moment of radical innocence before the lightning strikes.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Beautiful Revolutionary