Lost Innocence Quotes

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“One by one, drops fell from her eyes like they were on an assembly line - gather, fall, slide...gather, fall, slide...each one commemorating something she had lost. Hope. Faith. Confidence. Pride. Security. Trust. Independence. Joy. Beauty. Freedom. Innocence.”
― Lisi Harrison, Monster High

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

“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, Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

“Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“She looks like an empty shell of a woman with her soul hovering above her. We believe in spiritual guías in Santo Domingo. Hers is her own self. I can see Mami’s soul desperately trying to find its way back into her small body.”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“There are times when girls are inspired, when they want the risks to go on and on. They want to be heroines, regardless. They want to take a joke beyond where anybody has ever taken it before. To be careless, dauntless, to create havoc--that was the lost hope of girls.”
― Alice Munro, Open Secrets: Stories

“Could there be shadier sides of life of which I was not yet aware? I didn't like to think that there were - but at the same time I didn't like to think that there weren't.”
― Alan Bradley, Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd

“Most of the songs were based round the theme of lost innocence and as that's precisely what we were experiencing at the time, we tended to look inwards rather than outwards.”
― Nicky Wire, A Version of Reason: In Search of Richey Edwards

“We reinvent our childhoods in deep colors, but are forced to face reality the moment we open our eyes.”
― Courtney M. Privett, Mayfly Requiem

“Something died in the American people on November 22, 1963—call it idealism, innocence or the quest for moral excellence. It is the transformation of human beings which is the authentic reason and motive for the Kennedy murder.”
― James Shelby Downard, King-Kill/33

“Erecto . It said it should allow you to erect something.”

Nolan snorts. “Yeah. I don't think we have a problem in that department"

"I thought it might use air magic to lift something up,"

"Oh I’m sure it does. With a little blowing, it’ll lift right up.”

“More like explode,”
― H.A. Wills, Bound Spirit

“Un rato é unha cousa que se move,
unha cousa que vive nos sobrados
e ten un corazón pequerrechiño
e dous ollos de vidro sempre acesos.
Unha cousa que vai furando as tebras,
xurde correndo, pasa, fuxe, líscase.
Un rato é unha cousa que está viva
un intre só, despois non é nada,
sombra nas sombras mestas dos buratos.
A noite é un burato sen orelas
pra os homes, tristes ratos sin acougo.
Un home é unha cousa que cavila,
cismando sempre, sempre amargurado,
fuxindo de outras cousas que rebulen,
revolvendo papeis,
decote rebulindo,
sempre con presas, atafegado sempre,
camiña, chouta, avanta nos buratos,
nos sobrados do mundo,
nas estradas da vida,
nas pedras,
no vento,
nas rúas,
nos seos das mulleres.
Un rato é unha cousa que se move.
Escóitame Walt Disney ¿Onde estabas
que os meus soños de pombas non te viron
cando o meu corazón inda era neno
e había carabeles nos meus ollos?”
― Celso Emilio Ferreiro, O Soño Sulagado

“devouring their dark lips, dark with wine and fleeting love, an ancient memory love had promised but finally never gave, until there were too many kisses to count or remember, and the memory of love proved not love at all and needed a replacement, which our bodies found, and then the giggles subsided, and the laughter dimmed, and darkness enfolded all of us and we gave away our childhood for nothing and we died”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves: The Remastered Full-Color Edition