innocence Quotes

“Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

“There’s a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep ‘em all away from you. That’s never possible.”

“So it took an eight-year-old child to bring ‘em to their senses...That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they’re still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children.”

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy . . . but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

“Sibyl? Oh, she was so shy and so gentle. There is something of a child about her. Her eyes opened wide in exquisite wonder when I told her what I thought of her performance, and she seemed quite unconscious of her power.”

“I meant no harm. I most truly did not. But I had to grow bigger. So bigger I got.”

“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of a true, wise friend called Piggy.”

“When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. ”

“None of my ten friends, even today, ascribes moral evil to Hitler, although most of them think (after the fact) that he made fatal strategical mistakes which even they themselves might have made at the time. His worst mistake was his selection of advisers—a backhand tribute to the Leader’s virtues of trustfulness and loyalty, to his very innocence of the knowledge of evil, fully familiar to those who have heard partisans of F. D. R. or Ike explain how things went wrong.”

“I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.”

“The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.”

“The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn’t know. They didn’t know because they didn’t want to know; but they didn’t know. They could have found out, at the time, only if they had wanted to very badly.”

“I fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to. If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it, all through as I did in the beginning, because I am, as you say, sensitive. But I didn’t want to see it, because I would have then had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community.”

“’You see,’ said Candide to Martin, ‘that crime is sometimes punished. This rogue of a Dutch skipper has met with the fate he deserved.’ ‘Yes,’ said Martin; ‘but why should the passengers be doomed also to destruction? God has punished the knave, and the devil has drowned the rest.’”

“They became acquainted with sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then science appeared. As they became wicked they began talking of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those ideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice and drew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and to ensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardly remembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe that they had ever been happy and innocent.”

“Four hundred vertical feet above, where the summit was still washed in bright sunlight under an immaculate cobalt sky, my compadres dallied to memorialize their arrival at the apex of the planet, unfurling flags and snapping photos, using up precious ticks of the clock.”

“None of them imagined that a horrible ordeal was drawing nigh. Nobody suspected that by the end of that long day, every minute would matter.”

“It wasn’t my fault. He hurt me. It wasn’t my fault. And I’m not going to let it kill me. I can grow.”

“I want you to know, Stanley, that I respect you,” Mr. Pendanski said. “I understand you’ve made some bad mistakes in your life. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. But everyone makes mistakes. You may have done some bad things, but that doesn’t mean you’re a bad kid.” Stanley nodded. It seemed pointless to try and tell his counselor that he was innocent. He figured that everyone probably said that.

“Arthur was happy. Like the man in Eden before the fall, he was enjoying his innocence and fortune.”

“I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence, and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.”

″...but it seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough.”

“They had never been there in the dark. But there was enough moon for them to find their way into the castle, and he could tell her about his day in Washington. And apologize. It had been so dumb of him not to ask if Leslie could go, too.”

“When you’re living in the reality of the forgiveness you been extended, you just don’t get angry with others easily. I suspect our sense of entitlement to anger is directly proportional to our perception of our own relative innocence.”

″‘You fool,’ said Lupin softly. ‘Is a schoolboy grudge worth putting an innocent man back inside Azkaban?‘”

“As you perceive, the only person responsible for the couple’s offense escaped; and not only escaped but became the executioner of the innocent.”

“I didn’t know what to do or say. In a matter of seconds it seemed, I had gone from being angered by her strength, to being amazed by her innocence, and then frightened by her vulnerability. And now I felt numb, strangely weak, as if someone had unplugged me and the current running through me had stopped.”

″‘Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.‘”

“To see a wretched criminal squirming in the dock, suffering the tortures of the damned… was to me an exquisite pleasure. Mind you, I took no pleasure in seeing an innocent man there.”

“Suddenly those stares made sense. My intentions didn’t matter. They didn’t know I didn’t want this. In their eyes, I was a threat. And I could see they wanted me gone.”

“To tell you the truth, boss, I don’t know much of anything.”

“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

“He wore his innocence like a comfortable old coat.”

“You are innocent until you understand.”

“It would have been impossible to carry a bad name with a greater sweetness of innocence, and by the time I had got back to Bly with him I remained merely bewildered—so far, that is, as I was not outraged—by the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in a drawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I declared to her that it was grotesque. She promptly understood me. ‘You mean the cruel charge—?’ ‘It doesn’t live an instant. My dear woman, LOOK at him!‘”

“Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator... My heart had stood still for an instant with the wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I held my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited, but nothing came...”

“To gaze into the depths of blue of the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation. I couldn’t abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat to Mrs. Grose—as I did there, over and over, in the small hours—that with their voices in the air, their pressure on one’s heart, and their fragrant faces against one’s cheek, everything fell to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty.”

“We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ the sun, And bleat the one at the other: what we changed Was innocence for innocence;”

“STEVE I thought you you’re supposed to be innocent until you’re proven guilty? O’BRIEN That’s true, but in reality it depends on how the jury sees the case.”

“I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.”

“It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.”

“There is likewise another great advantage in my scheme, that it will prevent those abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas, too frequent among us, sacrificing the poor innocent babes, I doubt, more to avoid the expense than the shame.”

“She had immense eyes that always seemed in danger of capsizing in their own innocence.”

“Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence.”

Being a children’s book, I thought I would love it for the innocence in the writing and the illustrations. But heck, no (again!) I enjoyed it for what it is. Full of adventure, full of Robinson Crusoe vibes.

“With each gleaning I commit, with each life taken for the good of humanity, I mourn for the boy I once was, whose name I sometimes struggle to remember. And I long for a place beyond immortality where I can, in some small measure, resurrect the wonder, and be that boy again.”

“What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?”

″...He asked himself if May’s face was doomed to thicken into the same middle-aged image of invincible innocence. Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!”

“Boys scattered around the hills never would play with Ben. They said it was because he was so little and nervous. But M.C. had played with Ben from the time he was a child and didn’t know better. When he was older, he had been told. Now he guessed Ben was like a bad habit he couldn’t break and had to keep secret.”

“Then the telephone rang like a spoiled brat. I shoved it down the Insinkerator. I must state here and now I have nothing whatever against the Insinkerator; it was an innocent bystander. I feel sorry for it now, a practical device indeed, which never said a word, purred like a sleepy lion most of the time, and digested our leftovers. I’ll have it restored.”

“It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence;”

“And she said I was no gentleman, and refused to tell me. So as she wouldn’t confess, of course I arrested her, and to be on the safe side I also arrested everybody else in the shop, and the Baby into the bargain.”

“Grandfather looked at us. Then he said, ‘We are Christians. Bear in mind that the Jews crucified our Lord.’ Here Father interjected, ‘But not the Schneiders!‘”

“But when, at the Assize Court, he brought in the key to the whole case, he did not tell the whole truth. He only allowed so much of it to appear as sufficed to ensure the acquittal of an innocent man.”

“When people throw themselves into the arms of justice with the proofs of complicity on them, you can be sure they are not accomplices.”

“I don’t think your brother did it – and I’m going to try to prove it.”

Nobody seemed to know where they came from, but there they were in the Forest: Kanga and Baby Roo. When Pooh asked Christopher Robin, “How did they come here?” Christopher Robin said, “In the Usual Way, if you know what I mean, Pooh,” and Pooh, who didn’t, said “Oh!” Then he nodded his head twice and said, “In the Usual Way. Ah!”

“It’s—I wondered—It’s only—Rabbit, I suppose you don’t know, What does the North Pole look like?” “Well,” said Rabbit, stroking his whiskers. “Now you’re asking me.” “I did know once, only I’ve sort of forgotten,” said Christopher Robin carelessly. “It’s a funny thing,” said Rabbit, “but I’ve sort of forgotten too, although I did know once.” “I suppose it’s just a pole stuck in the ground?” “Sure to be a pole,” said Rabbit, “because of calling it a pole, and if it’s a pole, well, I should think it would be sticking in the ground, shouldn’t you, because there’d be nowhere else to stick it.”

The Piglet was sitting on the ground at the door of his house blowing happily at a dandelion, and wondering whether it would be this year, next year, sometime or never. He had just discovered that it would be never, and was trying to remember what “it” was, and hoping it wasn’t anything nice, when Pooh came up.

Well, he washed the pot out, and dried it, while Owl licked the end of his pencil, and wondered how to spell “birthday.” “Can you read, Pooh?” he asked a little anxiously. “There’s a notice about knocking and ringing outside my door, which Christopher Robin wrote. Could you read it?” “Christopher Robin told me what it said, and then I could.” “Well, I’ll tell you what this says, and then you’ll be able to.” So Owl wrote ... and this is what he wrote: HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY. Pooh looked on admiringly. “I’m just saying ‘A Happy Birthday’,” said Owl carelessly. “It’s a nice long one,” said Pooh, very much impressed by it. “Well, actually, of course, I’m saying ‘A Very Happy Birthday with love from Pooh.’ Naturally it takes a good deal of pencil to say a long thing like that.” “Oh, I see,” said Pooh.

“We’re going to discover the North Pole.” “Oh!” said Pooh again. “What is the North Pole?” he asked. “It’s just a thing you discover,” said Christopher Robin carelessly, not being quite sure himself.

“Was that me?” said Christopher Robin in an awed voice, hardly daring to believe it. “That was you.” Christopher Robin said nothing, but his eyes got larger and larger, and his face got pinker and pinker.

“I’m planting a haycorn, Pooh, so that it can grow up into an oak-tree, and have lots of haycorns just outside the front door instead of having to walk miles and miles, do you see, Pooh?” “Supposing it doesn’t?” said Pooh. “It will, because Christopher Robin says it will, so that’s why I’m planting it.” “Well,” said Pooh, “if I plant a honeycomb outside my house, then it will grow up into a beehive.” Piglet wasn’t quite sure about this.

“Besides, Pooh, it’s a very difficult thing, planting unless you know how to do it,” he said; and he put the acorn in the hole he had made, and covered it up with earth, and jumped on it. “I do know,” said Pooh, “because Christopher Robin gave me a mastershalum seed, and I planted it, and I’m going to have mastershalums all over the front door.” “I thought they were called nasturtiums,” said Piglet timidly, as he went on jumping. “No,” said Pooh. “Not these. These are called mastershalums.”

“Come on, Pooh,” and he walked off quickly. “Where are we going?” said Pooh, hurrying after him, and wondering whether it was to be an Explore or a What-shall-I-do-about-you-know-what. “Nowhere,” said Christopher Robin.

So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was still looking at the world, with his chin in his hands, called out “Pooh!” “Yes?” said Pooh. “When I’m—when——Pooh!” “Yes, Christopher Robin?” “I’m not going to do Nothing any more.” “Never again?” “Well, not so much. They don’t let you.” Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again. “Yes, Christopher Robin?” said Pooh helpfully. “Pooh, when I’m—you know—when I’m not doing Nothing, will you come up here sometimes?” “Just Me?” “Yes, Pooh.” “Will you be here too?” “Yes, Pooh, I will be, really. I promise I will be, Pooh.” “That’s good,” said Pooh.

“Is it a very Grand thing to be an Afternoon, what you said?” “A what?” said Christopher Robin lazily, as he listened to something else. “On a horse,” explained Pooh. “A Knight?” “Oh, was that it?” said Pooh. “I thought it was a——Is it as Grand as a King and Factors and all the other things you said?” “Well, it’s not as grand as a King,” said Christopher Robin, and then, as Pooh seemed disappointed, he added quickly, “but it’s grander than Factors.” “Could a Bear be one?” “Of course he could!” said Christopher Robin. “I’ll make you one.” And he took a stick and touched Pooh on the shoulder, and said, “Rise, Sir Pooh de Bear, most faithful of all my Knights.”

“How do you do Nothing?” asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time. “Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, What are you going to do, Christopher Robin, and you say, Oh, nothing, and then you go and do it.”

When he thought of that rapt light being quenched in her eyes he had an uncomfortable feeling that he was going to assist at murdering something—much the same feeling that came over him when he had to kill a lamb or calf or any other innocent little creature.

“Come away, mother! Come away, or yonder old Black Man will catch you! He hath got hold of the minister already. Come away, mother, or he will catch you! But he cannot catch little Pearl!”

She had been so simply taught that there was no nonsense in her head, and at fifteen she was as innocent and frank as any child.

“Mother,” said little Pearl, “the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. Now, see! There it is, playing, a good way off. Stand you here, and let me run and catch it. I am but a child. It will not flee from me; for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!

“And, mother, he has his hand over his heart! Is it because, when the minister wrote his name in the book, the Black Man set his mark in that place?”

“Let me be a little girl as long as I can.”

“I am not going there to be imprisoned,” said Dantès; “it is only used for political prisoners. I have committed no crime.”

“What matters really, not only to me, but to officers of justice and the king, is that an innocent man should languish in prison, the victim of an infamous denunciation, to die here cursing his executioners.”

“I share your hopes; the anger of Heaven will not pursue us, since you are pure and I am innocent.”

I looked at him eagerly when he looked at me, and slightly moved my hands and shook my head. I had been waiting for him to see me that I might try to assure him of my innocence. It was not at all expressed to me that he even comprehended my intention, for he gave me a look that I did not understand, and it all passed in a moment. But if he had looked at me for an hour or for a day, I could not have remembered his face ever afterwards, as having been more attentive.

At the time when I stood in the churchyard reading the family tombstones, I had just enough learning to be able to spell them out. My construction even of their simple meaning was not very correct, for I read “wife of the Above” as a complimentary reference to my father’s exaltation to a better world; and if any one of my deceased relations had been referred to as “Below,” I have no doubt I should have formed the worst opinions of that member of the family.

“Do you know, or do you not know, that the law of England supposes every man to be innocent, until he is proved—proved—to be guilty?”

I whistled and made nothing of going. But the village was very peaceful and quiet, and the light mists were solemnly rising, as if to show me the world, and I had been so innocent and little there, and all beyond was so unknown and great, that in a moment with a strong heave and sob I broke into tears. It was by the finger-post at the end of the village, and I laid my hand upon it, and said, “Good-bye, O my dear, dear friend!”