Loss Of Innocence Quotes

A woman stood in front of her with the peculiar poise that comes before the discovery of age and after the loss of innocence. ~ Donald Kingsbury

Something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was the childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that Man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places, who do not have to endure war's savagery, will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it. ~ Eugene B. Sledge

Rachel found herself wishing that the week would never end-that her father could stay here forever-but knew he couldn't. If there was one thing she had learned in her brief time at Kalaupapa, it was that all things end. ~ Alan Brennert

The loss of innocence is inevitable, but the death of innocence disturbs the natural order. The death of innocence causes an imbalance and initiates an internal war that manifests differently in each individual, but almost always includes anger, withdrawal and severe depression. ~ B.G. Bowers

Perhaps he simply assumed: a bitterness of habit, of boy after boy trained for music and medicine, and unleashed for murder. ~ Madeline Miller

A loss of sensibility follows a loss of innocence, at once a penalty and a compensation. ~ Dodie Smith

The moment you killed something – a living creature or a false hope – was the moment you came of age. Loss of innocence wasn't a passive experience that happened to you. It was something you gave up. ~ Jennifer Miller

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

Don't we all look back in longing, those of us who had happy childhoods? Because the greatest loss we ever know is not the loss of family or place or money, it is the loss of innocence. There is forever a hollow place in our hearts once we realize that darkness rings the campfire. ~ Carolyn Hart

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

I wish him episodes of glorious, sun-washed tedium and a loss of innocence he will contemplate for the rest of his life. ~ Julie Schumacher

Never mourn the loss of innocence, because it always brings the much greater gain of wisdom. ~ Erica Goros

The child I was
is just one breath away from me. ~ Sheniz Janmohamed

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

I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost. ~ Bruce Springsteen

And she felt the beauty in the music now, drank it in with tears streaming down her face. Never had she been so naked in worship before her Creator, allowing the adoration to bleed out her very fingertips onto the strings, playing her heart's cry for every single lost soul, for the loss of innocence every generation to come would possess as a result of what happened at the killing fields of Auschwitz. ~ Kristy Cambron

The loss of innocence is the most severe of growing pains. ~ Tarryn Fisher

All the great words, it seemed to Connie were cancelled, for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now and dying from day to day. ~ D.H. Lawrence

But shouldn't they still act like children? They aren't normal. They act like
history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus. ~ Orson Scott Card

It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out. ~ Tom Hiddleston

'Good Times' is a story about the loss of innocence, how adults are responsible for their actions but children aren't. ~ Lynda Barry

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator. ~ Thomas Pynchon

One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence. ~ Jodi Picoult

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 wondered what his heart would look like if he could pluck it from his chest and inspect it. ~ David Estes

he realized with a shock that the loss of innocence never stopped happening, that he was still losing it, that it was like a wound that never healed, and he would probably go on losing it, drop by drop, until the day he died. ~ Peter Robinson

For long minutes we cried, our grief inconsolable. We mourned the innocence of our childhood love; we grieved as parents of our own children. We agonized in the unfairness of the haphazard and tumultuous world we'd been pushed out into through our mothers' flesh. We wept for the first time, one among many firsts we'd shared, for the sheer emotional pain of bedrock loss. ~ Larry J. Dunlap

... the fabric of family, the limits of love, the loss of innocence and the birth of knowledge. ~ Betty Smith

She realized that she had naïvely believed that the workings of the world revolved around her and her family. Never before had she acknowledged that somebody else's life might alter hers. ~ David Anthony Durham

He remembered a version of himself untrammeled by expectation, unimpeded by Ego. He had suffered in the many years since then, seeking to return to that original self, if, in fact, it ever existed. And yet, he was helpless but to regard that unmistakable fear that gripped him in his dream as a sign that his unevenness lent him now to utter incongruity with this specter of past. ~ Ashim Shanker

This is what making love must be like, she thinks. At twelve years old, she understands little more than that it will begin with loss - the loss of virginity, the loss of innocence - but that at some point there stands to be a gain. ~ Sheri Holman

Losing your innocence has very little to do with virginity, you know. Loss of innocence comes when you have to deal with the real world by yourself, when you learn that the first rule of life is kill or be killed. So different from one's nursery stories." She ~ Shirley Conran

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

Then there are also the quiet deaths. How about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or the queen of Sheba? Feel the silent distance between yourself and how you felt as a child, between yourself and those feelings of wonder and splendor and trust. Feel the mature fondness for who you once were, and your current need to protect innocence wherever you make might find it. The silence that surrounds the loss of innocence is a most serious death, and yet it is necessary for the onset of maturity.

What about the day we began working not for ourselves, but rather with the hope that our kids have a better life? Or the day we realize that, on the whole, adult life is deeply repetitive? As our lives roll into the ordinary, when our ideals sputter and dissipate, as we wash the dishes after yet another meal, we are integrating death, a little part of us is dying so that another part can live. ~ Matthew Sanford

To this day when I inhale a light scent of Wrangler - its sweet sharpness - or the stronger, darker scent of Musk, I return to those hours and it ceases to be just cologne that I take in but the very scent of age, of youth at its most beautiful peak. It bears the memory of possibility, of unknown forests, unchartered territories, and a heart light and skipping, hell-bent as the captain of any of the three ships, determined at all costs to prevail to the new world. Turning back was no option. Whatever the gales, whatever the emaciation, whatever the casualty to self, onward I kept my course. My heart felt the magnetism of its own compass guiding me on - its direction constant and sure. There was no other way through. I feel it again as once it had been, before it was broken-in; its strength and resolute ardency. The years of solitude were nothing compared to what lay ahead. In sailing for the horizon that part of my life had been sealed up, a gentle eddy, a trough of gentle waves diminishing further, receding away. Whatever loneliness and
pain went with the years between the ages of 14 and 20, was closed, irretrievable - I was already cast in form and direction in a certain course.

When I open the little bottle of eau de toilette five hundred different days unfold within me, conversations so strained, breaking slowly, so painstakingly, to a comfortable place. A place so warm and inviting after the years of silence and introspect, of hiding.

A place ~ Wheston Chancellor Grove

I felt my throat tighten and constrict. My hearts ached with a pain I could not describe. I wondered if I were dying. I felt not sadness. I felt pity. For myself. For us all. We were children no longer. And we never would be again. ~ K.A. Applegate

In youth, our blood rises and becomes volatile. Desire, worry, and anxiety increase. External circumstances now direct the rise and fall of emotions. Will and intention become constrained by social conventions. Competition, conflict, and scheming are the norm in interactions with people. The approval and disapproval of others become important, and the honest and sincere expression of thoughts and feelings is lost. ~ Liezi

Once the eyes are closed and the heart is stilled, we come to understand that the worst of the pain has passed. For them. The dead have no more use for pain, for memory or regret. Regret is for the living.
And so when we stand at the bedside, the graveside, the casket, our mourning is less for the beloved departed than it is for ourselves. We mourn the missed opportunity, the word unspoken or spoken in haste, the hole in our lives and the unsettling of our souls, our own disappointments and the loss of innocence. ~ Marie Bostwick

I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't realised was there. ~ Han Kang

Midlife crisis, it turns out, is much less about a loss of flesh and far more about a loss of innocence, the stripping-away of the illusion of choice and order. ~ Steve Ochs

When I got untethered from the comfort of religion, it wasn't a loss of faith for me, it was a discovery of self. I had faith that I'm capable enough to handle any situation. There's peace in understanding that I have only one life, here and now, and [that] I'm responsible. ~ Brad Pitt

What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it. The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning. ~ Carl Jung

All you need are a pair of tennis shoes and motivation to change the course of your life. ~ Heidi Bond

I am not the same what i was before few years. The loss of them changed me that is why people may think i have lot of attitude. ~ Wahid Bhat

Once I'm free, we're going to find out exactly how much pain you can endure while remaining conscious. I won't stop until you tell me where my ring is." He leaned in to say at his ear, "I'll be sure to make you feel your loss. ~ Kresley Cole

For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and restoration of function with the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated, potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender ~ Donna J. Haraway

Michelle Alexander's brave and bold new book paints a haunting picture in which dreary felon garb, post-prison joblessness, and loss of voting rights now do the stigmatizing work once done by colored-only water fountains and legally segregated schools. With dazzling candor, Alexander argues that we all pay the cost of the new Jim Crow. ~ Lani Guinier

Annie, who up until this very day had always felt like a child--which is why she could not marry, she could not be a wife--now felt quietly ancient. She thought how for years onstage she had used the image of walking up the dirt road holding her father's hand, the snow-covered fields spread around them, the woods in the distance, joy spilling through her--how she had used this scene to have tears immediately come to her eyes, for the happiness of it, and the loss of it. And now she wondered if it had even happened, if the road had ever been narrow and dirt, if her father had ever held her hand and said that his family was the most important thing to him. ~ Elizabeth Strout

Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
It must eat and breath air and sleep,
It has thin skin and blood right underneath,
An adequate stock of teeth and nails,
Its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.

Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it is shuddered
Before the founding of Rome and after,
In the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are as they were, it's just the earth that's grown smaller,
And whatever happens seems on the other side of the wall.

Nothing has changed.
It's just that there are more people,
Besides the old offenses, new ones have appeared,
Real, imaginary, temporary, and none,
But the howl with which the body responds to them,
Was, and is, and ever will be a howl of innocence
According to the time-honored scale and tonality.

Nothing has changed.
Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances,
Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same.
The body writhes, jerks, and tries to pull away
Its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up,
It turns blue, swells, salivates, and bleeds.

Nothing has changed.
Except of course for the course of boundaries,
The lines of forests, coasts, deserts, and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
Disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves a ~ Wisława Szymborska

When exactly did this downward cultural spiral begin, this loss of tact and refinement and understanding that some things should not be said or directly represented? When did we no longer appreciate that to dignify certain modes of behavior, manners, and ways of being with artistic representation was implicitly to glorify and promote them? There is, as Adam Smith said, a deal of ruin in a nation: and this truth applies as much to a nation's culture as to its economy. The work of cultural destruction, while often swifter, easier, and more self-conscious than that of construction, is not the work of a moment. Rome wasn't destroyed in a day. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

For me, physical love has always been bound to an irresistible feeling of innocence and joy. Thus, I cannot love in tears but in exaltation. ~ Albert Camus

Let no man pray that he know not sorrow, Let no soul ask to be free from pain, For the gall of to-day is the sweet of to-morrow, And the moment's loss is the lifetime's gain. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain's stress-response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviours toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall.

Emotionally unsatisfying child-parent interaction is a theme running through the one hundred or so detailed interviews I conducted for this book. These patients suffer from a broadly disparate range of illnesses, but the common threads in their stories are early loss or early relationships that were profoundly unfulfilling emotionally. Early childhood emotional deprivation in the histories of adults with serious illness is also verified by an impressive number of investigations reported in the medical and psychological literature. In an Italian study, women with genital cancers were reported to have felt less close to their parents than healthy controls. They were also less demonstrative emotionally. A large European study compared 357 cancer patients with 330 controls. The women with cancer were much less likely than controls to recall their childhood homes with positive feel ~ Gabor Mate

Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine. ~ Victor C. Ferkiss

It's a picture," Nosh explained, grinning at my innocence. "This is a phone. It's made of metal, plastic, and glass. I can use it to call people over long distances. Or find answers to questions. Or directions to go places. Or to order food."

I blinked, dumbfounded. "A demon familiar…" I breathed. I snatched it back from his hand and held it to my mouth. "Bring me blood, demon. Your master is thirsty." I pulled the phone away and stared at it, wondering where the food would appear. ~ Shayne Silvers

Do not think dishonestly ... Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters. Develop intuitive judgement and understanding for everything. Perceive those things which cannot be seen. Pay attention even to trifles. Do nothing which is of no use. ~ Miyamoto Musashi

I looked at the place on my finger again. This time it really was an empty space. And silent. It was big. For the first time I faced a loss with a sense of curiosity. What would come to fill up this space? Would I make another ring? Or would I find another ring in a secondhand shop, or even in another country? Perhaps someday someone I had not even met would give me a ring because he loved me. I was thirty-five and I had never trusted life before. I had never allowed any empty spaces. I had believed that empty spaces remained empty. Life had been about hanging on to what you had and medical training had only reinforced the avoidance of loss at all costs. Anything I had ever let go of had claw marks on it. Yet this empty space had become different. It held all the excitement and anticipation of a wrapped Christmas present. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

But you were a goody-goody, you said.' 'Even goody-goodies think about such things. In fact, I would say that's what defines us. We're always thinking about the things we don't dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality. ~ Laura Lippman

Institutions work this way. A son is murdered by the police, and nothing is done. The institutions send the victim's family on a merry-go-round, going from one agency to another, until they wear out and give up. this is a very effective way to beat down poor and oppressed people, who do not have the time to prosecute their cases. Time is money to poor people. To go to Sacramento means loss of a day's pay - often a loss of job. If this is a democracy, obviously it is a bourgeois democracy limited to the middle and upper classes. Only they can afford to participate in it. ~ Huey Newton

For anyone who knows what it is to weep over sin or loss or pain, Heaven offers a beautiful promise: one day God himself will wipe the tears from our eyes. And even better, one day he will transform those tears into laughter. The Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Revelation 7:17 ~ Randy Alcorn

If we've been born once already (which we know we have) why then is it so hard for some to believe that we've been born before? The answer to that is nothing other than the information about life one has previously received. ~ Renée Chae

The more we heat up the planet, the more it costs all of us, not just in money, but in colossal famines, displacements, deaths, and species extinctions, as well as in the loss of some of the things that make this planet a blue-green jewel, including its specialized habitats from the melting Arctic to bleaching coral reefs. ~ Rebecca Solnit

One of the key elements of human behavior is, humans have a greater fear of loss than enjoyment of success. All the academic studies will show you that the fear of loss of capital is far greater than the enjoyment of gains. ~ Laurence D. Fink

All victims have experienced a loss-a thwarted desire or aspiration-even if they're not aware of it. ~ David Emerald Womeldorff

The human body represents to me the same universal innocence, timelessness and purity of all seed pods, suggesting the mother as well as the child, the parental as well as the descendant, conceived according to nature's longings. ~ Ruth Bernhard

The economic recession in America wasn't caused by bad luck; it was caused by bad Republican policies. But the Republican candidates are doubling down on the same flawed policies that led to the loss of 3.6 million jobs in the final months of 2008 and gravely affected middle class families across America. ~ Debbie Wasserman Schultz

We live in a time of era where there is no value for innocence. People don't worth the innocence. And innocent people remain the sufferer and vulnerable to the world. ~ Salman Aziz

despair

sometimes
hope leads us on
teases us with
its shiny baubles
its stunning horizons

it can carry us over
the roiling turmoil
the raging storm
then as easily
with its cornucopia of lies
drop us into the waves

to flounder against its loss ~ Barry DeCarli

The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous. ~ Maya Angelou

I learn urgently
the architecture of loss
then find you again. ~ Warsan Shire

If grief kills us not, we kill it. Not that I cease to grieve; for each hour, revealing to me how excelling and matchless the being was, who once was mine, but renews the pang with which I deplore my alien state upon earth. But such is God's will; I am doomed to a divided existence, and I submit. Meanwhile I am human; and human affections are the native, luxuriant growth of a heart, whose weakness it is, too eagerly, and too fondly, to seek objects on whom to expend its yearning. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley