Age Of Innocence Quotes

Poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked the final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission. ~ Philip Zaleski

He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate. ~ Edith Wharton

When I started, there was something almost romantic about the notion of paparazzi. I mean, it wasn't. They were still chasing you down the road. But that guy had to put film in his camera and work out whether it was worth pressing the button to take the shot, otherwise he's got to stop and change the film. So it was like this age of innocence. ~ Kylie Minogue

But I can cite ten other reasons for not being a father."
"First of all, I don't like motherhood," said Jakub, and he broke off pensively. "Our century has already unmasked all myths. Childhood has long ceased to be an age of innocence. Freud discovered infant sexuality and told us all about Oedipus. Only Jocasta remains untouchable; no one dares tear off her veil. Motherhood is the last and greatest taboo, the one that harbors the most grievous curse. There is no stronger bond than the one that shackles mother to child. This bond cripples the child's soul forever and prepares for the mother, when her son has grown up, the most cruel of all the griefs of love. I say that motherhood is a curse, and I refuse to contribute to it."
"Another reason I don't want to add to the number of mothers," said Jakub with some embarrassment, "is that I love the female body, and I am disgusted by the thought of my beloved's breast becoming a milk-bag."
"The doctor here will certainly confirm that physicians and nurses treat women hospitalized after an aborted pregnancy more harshly than those who have given birth, and show some contempt toward them even though they themselves will, at least once in their lives, need a similar operation. But for them it's a reflex stronger than any kind of thought, because the cult of procreation is an imperative of nature. That's why it's useless to look for the slightest rational argument in natalist propaganda. Do you perhaps think it's the vo ~ Milan Kundera

Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways. ~ Edith Wharton

We were at an age of innocence when, through touch and sound, taste and smell and sight, once could sense things beyond the surface, when it seemed to use that blood flowed even through inanimate objects. We were at an age when we could not foresee that one day our senses would convince us only of our captivity in space and time, and not lead us to an awareness of somthing beyond. We were at an age of innocence when the soul is still soft clay and does not know that one day it will turn to stone or barren earth; we were at an age when the soul is clay that can easily be warmed by a kindred spirit, when it is possible for two to become one. We were at an age of innocence when a shy look and a secretly expressed longing make our souls erupt under the delicate and tender wrap of our bodies, an age when the soul and the body are still bound into one, an age when excitement does not know it will someday turn into indifference or to a simple urge to satisfy bodily needs, and that when one manages to infuse oneself with passion there is neither the capability nor the desire to turn that moment of pleasure into a brief eternity. ~ Goce Smilevski

In the world of The Age of Innocence, a financial disaster or moral scandal would permanently exile a guest from the finest dinner tables. In contemporary New York, a mere change of fashion can eliminate a place setting; therefore, the need to maintain a rigidity not of morals, but of taste, seems all the more desperate. ~ Wendy Wasserstein

Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again. ~ Ang Lee

In the two-room flat where I live in Japan, I try to take time every day to step away from the bombardment of e-mails and opportunities and papers around my desk, for an hour, and just sit on our 30-inch terrace in the sun, reading something sustaining, whether 'The Age of Innocence' or the latest by Colm Toibin. ~ Pico Iyer

The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future. ~ Edith Wharton

I can remember being eight, and I like writing about that age of innocence when children still have a sense of wonder. ~ John Boyne

The patch of lawn before it had relapsed into a hayfield; but to the left an overgrown box-garden full of dahlias and rusty rose-bushes encircled a ghostly summer-house of trellis-work that had once been white, surmounted by a wooden Cupid who had lost his bow and arrow but continued to take ineffectual aim. ~ Edith Wharton

I wrote 'The Match,' my cricket novel, between 2002 and 2005. In retrospect, almost an age of innocence in cricket and a time when it was rare to find the game deep in fiction. ~ Romesh Gunesekera

The early and the latter part of human life are the best, or, at least, the most worthy of respect; the one as the age of innocence, the other of reason. ~ Joseph Joubert

Farewell, Timothy Riley's Bar," Lane said softly. "Home of the nickel beer. Snooker emporium. Repository of Bluebird records, three for a dime. We honor you and your passing. Farewell. Farewell, Timothy Riley - and terraplanes and rumbleseats and saddle shoes and Helen Forrest and the Triple-C camps and Andy Hardy and Lum 'n' Abner and the world-champion New York Yankees! Rest in peace, you age of innocence - you beautiful, serene, carefree, pre-Pearl Harbor, long summer night. We'll never see your likes again. ~ Rod Serling

He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise. ~ Edith Wharton

The rainbow is such a remarkable phenomenon of nature, and its cause has been so meticulously sought after by inquiring minds throughout the ages, that I could not choose a more appropriate subject for demonstrating how, with the method I am using, we can arrive at knowledge not possessed at all by those whose writings are available to us. ~ Rene Descartes

Flowers belong to Fairyland: the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age
the only perfectly beautiful things on earth
joyous, innocent, half divine
useless, say they who are wiser than God. ~ Ouida

My father taught me to paint when I was young with watercolors and so I learned at a very young age the essential elements of the value of light and composition. ~ Matthew Modine

People ask me how it happens that my children are all so promptly obedient and so happy. As if it chanced that some parents have such children or chanced that some have not! I am afraid it is only too true, as someone has remarked, that "this is the age of obedient parents!" What then will be the future of their children? How can they yield to God who have never been taught to yield to human authority? And how well fitted will they be to rule their own households who have never learned to rule themselves? ~ Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

Strange how things sometimes turn out. You grow up and experience things and read books and get to know people and places and arrive at an age that you used to believe in, and then in the end it seems that everything in life is a matter of luck, that your life and everyone's life is a small inside-out universe through which everything moves blindly and without purpose, a universe without a god, without rules, without purpose - chaos. And then something happens to shake that belief and you start to wonder whether you might have made a mistake, if there might in fact be something that gives meaning to the chaos, if there might be some secret thread that ties everything in your life together, a secret thread that ties your life to the lives of others. And you get scared. You get scared because while it might be truly frightening to live in chaos it's twice as frightening to know that you live not in chaos but in a world with laws and rules that you yourself will never learn, that you're incapable of learning - no matter how hard you try, you'll never find that thin secret thread, never grasp it, never find the thing that has both beginning and end. ~ Christos Ikonomou

And when youth comes to age for advice he receives the wisdom of years. ~ George S. Clason

The age of the self-made man was also the age of the broken man... This 'American sense' looked upon failure as a 'moral sieve' that trapped the loafer and passed the true man through. Such ideologies fixed blame squarely on individual faults, not extenuating circumstances. ~ Scott A. Sandage

It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. "Future ages shall talk of this; they shall be famous to all posterity;" whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now. ~ Jonathan Swift

They listened to the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, heard the horns of Elfland, and made designs on the culture that our own age is only beginning fully to appreciate. They were philologists and philomyths: lovers of logos (the ordering power of words) and mythos (the regenerative power of story), with a nostalgia for things medieval and archaic and a distrust of technological innovation that never decayed into the merely antiquarian. Out of the texts they studied and the tales they read, they forged new ways to convey old themes - sin and salvation, despair and hope, friendship and loss, fate and free will - in a time of war, environmental degradation, and social change. ~ Philip Zaleski

Life is a solitary confinement ,
Every second is a punishment
- of a crime , that was never committed ,
Or perhaps,
- the biggest crime of my age , is the silence of the soul.

You suffer silently
- as a sacrificial lamb to be slaughtered
- for a cause that is greater than your own existence !
They label you as a hero ,
- a super human with super human strength .

Yes , indeed .
The wars you fight every day
- every moment with your demons , and of course the price of being a hero !
Solitude ,
- A gift from god
- A curse on your own self. ~ BinYamin Gulzar

She grew up hard and she grew up fast, in the age of television. ~ Tom Petty

One's child is always one's child no matter what age they might be. You worry when your child makes a noise, when he doesn't. It's a terrible kind of love. Terrible. ~ Chris Womersley

[The] emperor of the West, the feeble and dissolute Valentinian, [had] reached his thirty-fifth year without attaining the age of reason or courage. ~ Edward Gibbon

If there's anything to learn from the history of movies, it's that corruption leads to further corruption, not to innocence. ~ Pauline Kael

I think we can all agree that Colin Firth falls into the George Clooney category of 'Men Who Age Like Fine Wine.' ~ Sarah MacLean

And isn't that weird? Think about this, when you're born, you nurse on your mama. And then you get a little older, you go to applesauce. And then you see these toddlers walking around with these Ziploc baggies full of Cheerios. Then you get to be my age, and the doctor wants you to start eating Cheerios to watch your cholesterol. Then you lose your teeth, you go to applesauce. I now know why old men like women with really big boobs. They see a trend. I mean, they call it a nursing home, hello. ~ Bill Engvall

[Women's magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don't exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, 'retouching artists' conspire to 'help' beautiful women look more beautiful, ie less than their age...By now readers have no idea what a real woman's 60 year old face looks like in print because it's made to look 45. Worse, 60 year old readers look in the mirror and think they are too old, because they're comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine. ~ Dalma Heyn

Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce ... in the same individual, we have the best possible conditions for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas posses them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age. ~ William James

Your personal history of pain, by the time you reached the age of forty, was supposedto have been folded thoroughly into the batter of the self, so that you barely needed to acknowledge it anymore. ~ Meg Wolitzer

That sense of loss grew within the humans who had been left behind, left to live without unicorns. Even the ones who had never seen a unicorn, never heard of a unicorn, felt the passing of something sweet and wonderful. It was as if the air had surrendered a bit of its spice, the water a bit of its sparkle, the night a bit of its mystery. ~ Bruce Coville

In an age of religious violence like ours, people care much less about what you believe, and much more about whether you will kill for what you believe. So if you haven't figured out what you're going to do with passages like Deuteronomy 7 and 1 Samuel 15 and Psalms 137:9, you still have some important work to do.3 If you haven't grappled with these passages and others like them, your Bible is like a loaded gun and your theology is like a license to kill. You have to find a way to disarm your faith as a potential instrument of hate and convert it into an instrument of love.4 You have to convert Christianity from a warrior religion to a reconciling religion. Otherwise, your neighbors around this seminary will tolerate you the way they might tolerate a chemical plant that could at any moment blow up and kill them all. ~ Brian McLaren

The only other style of music that attempts to go to the deeper place of the silence that is music is New Age music. ~ John Michael Talbot

Death reduces all men to the same rank. It strips the rich of his millions and the poor man of his rags ... Death knows no age limits, no partiality. It is a thing that all men fear. ~ Billy Graham

Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once. ~ Anais Nin

The name Mary Jo Quinn was written neatly in faded blue marker on the front of the scrapbook, its gray edges frayed with age and wear, as though it had been handled often. Such a memento was a strange thing to find in a used bookstore, especially when one considered its contents. I'd discovered the handmade tome buried on the bottom shelf on the back wall of a little musty-smelling shop in the tiny resort town of Copper Harbor. This picturesque community is the gateway to Isle Royale National Park, an island in the western quarter of Lake Superior that beckoned to hikers, kayakers and canoers. Copper Harbor is the northern-most bastion of civilization in Michigan on a crooked finger of land called the Keweenaw Peninsula. Its remote, pristine shoreline provided an excellent respite from a hellacious year for my best friend from high school and me on a late September weekend. ~ Nancy Barr

By the time of the arrival of Islam in the early seventeenth century CE, what we now call the Middle East was divided between the Persian and Byzantine empires. But with the spread of this new religion from Arabia, a powerful empire emerged, and with it a flourishing civilization and a glorious golden age.
Given how far back it stretches in time, the history of the region
and even of Iraq itself
is too big a canvas for me to paint. Instead, what I hope to do in this book is take on the nonetheless ambitious task of sharing with you a remarkable story; one of an age in which great geniuses pushed the frontiers of knowledge to such an extent that their work shaped civilizations to this day. ~ Jim Al-Khalili

It is surprising to notice that even from the earliest age, man finds the greatest satisfaction in feeling independent. The exalting feeling of being sufficient to oneself comes as a revelation. ~ Maria Montessori

That's really nice. I picture my mother and my aunt, a little over four years apart in age, curled up in the same bed, sharing innocent games of Let's Pretend. It makes the present situation seem that much sadder. Should geography and real estate signs outweigh the bonds formed by the shared milestones of childhood? ~ Lisa Wingate

Once we accept violence as an adaptation, it makes sense that its expression is calibrated to the environment. The same individual will behave differently if he comes of age in Detroit, Mich., versus Windsor, Ontario; in New York in the 1980s versus New York now; in a culture of honor versus a culture of dignity. ~ Paul Bloom

Age is an accumulation of life and loss. Adulthood is a series of lines crossed. ~ Ellen Goodman

In the age of revolution you have to be able to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the status quo. If you can't, you'll be relegated to the swollen ranks of keyboard-pounding automatons. ~ Gary Hamel

I wouldn't have thought her young enough, as I had put her age somewhere north of forty. ~ Teju Cole