Lost Innocence Quotes

Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. ~ Michael J. Sandel

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. ~ Umberto Eco

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

The age of lost innocence varies for each person. Some lose it when they learn that their childhood fantasies are merely myth, while others lose theirs due to trauma. As adults, we often look down our noses at those who manage to retain their innocence; we scoff at these few as being immature or irresponsible. Could it be that we hide our envy behind the cloudy eyes of our lost innocence? ~ J.D. Stroube

A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and reknitting of remembered words, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence, and in the shadow it casts over our present world, we begin to understand what we only intuited in our naivete-that while all else may vanish, love is our one eternity. ~ Vaddey Ratner

Nos-tal-gic,' Akira said, as though it were a word he had been struggling to find. Then he said a word in Japanese, perhaps the Japanese for 'nostalgic.' 'Nos-tal-gic. It is good to be nos-tal-gic. Very important.'

'Really, old fellow?'

'Important. Very important. Nostalgic. When we nostalgic, we remember. A world better than this world we discover when we grow. We remember and wish good world come back again. So very important. Just now, I had dream. I was boy. Mother, Father, close to me. in our house.'

He fell silent and continued to gaze across the rubble.

'Akira,' I said, sensing that the longer this talk went on, the greater was some danger I did not wish fully to articulate. 'We should move on. We have much to do. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Dearest Charles
I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start ... I am never quite alone. Members of my family keep turning up and collecting luggage and going away again, but the white raspberries are ripe. I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits. Love or what you will. S. ~ Evelyn Waugh

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

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. ~ Graham Greene

The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum . (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

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

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. ~ Thomas Paine

SoulsThat we might break these molds
And free our restless souls
Start to believe
That we can rise above
Our pettiness and love
Like we ain't loved before
Free on this earth
As the surf that rolls
And crashes on the shore
And hey now don't run and hide
Your little heart away
If it's gone
We'll sure never find it
Pining for lost innocence
Tantalisingly I saw
Our shadows moving through the door
Traces from a different time
When I was yours and you were truly mine
All mine ~ David Gray

Being part of the natural world reminds me that innocence isn't ever lost completely; we just need to maintain our goodness to regain it. ~ Jewel

To read these books, in this way, as an exercise in self-knowledge, carries certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of Political Philosophy has known. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us, and unsettles us, by confronting us with what we already know. There is an irony: the difficulty of this course consists in the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings, and making it strange. [...] Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing.

But, and here is the risk, once the familiar turns strange, it is never quite the same again. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. What makes this enterprise difficult, but also revetting, is that Moral and Political Philosophy is a story, and you don't know where the story would lead, but you do know that the story is about You. ~ Michael J. Sandel

If being premenstrual is "innocence," does that make those of us with periods guilty? And this really gets to the heart of the matter: These concerns aren't about lost innocence; they're about lost girlhood. The virginity movement doesn't want women to be adults.

Despite the movement's protestations about how this focus on innocence or preserving virginity is just a way of protecting girls, the truth is, it isn't a way to desexualize them. It simply positions their sexuality as "good" - worth talking about, protecting, and valuing - and women's sexuality, adult sexuality, as bad and wrong. The (perhaps) unintended consequences of this focus is that girl's sexuality is sexualized and fetishized even further. ~ Jessica Valenti

What if I have nothing left to fight for? I say, my voice shaking.

"Then you fight until you find something to fight for. But the moment you stop fighting the current, the moment you surrender to it, that's when you are truly lost. ~ Sherry D. Ficklin

You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now. ~ Walter Kirn

That's one of the reasons why 'Lost' has to end: because we can't sit around and envision, 'What is the flashback for Jack in year nine?' It doesn't realistically exist. ~ Carlton Cuse

Where truth is high ignorance is low.
Where certainty is high speculation is low.
Where pleasure is high pain is low.
Where joy is high grief is low.
Where love is high fear is low.
Where modesty is high ego is low.
Where tolerance is high injustice is low.
Where mercy is high vengeance is low.
Where integrity is high distrust is low.
Where justice is high crime is low.
Where equality is high abuse is low.
Where freedom is high slavery is low.
Where wealth is high poverty is low.
Where knowledge is high illiteracy is low.
Where wisdom is high imprudence is low.
Where harmony is high anarchy is low.
Where peace is high turmoil is low.
Where order is high chaos is low.
Where faith is high doubt is low.
Where light is high darkness is low.
Where good is high evil is low.
Where strength is high weakness is low.

Where pride is high wisdom is low.
Where sorrow is high bliss is low.
Where error is high truth is low.
Where despair is high confidence is low.
Where silence is high speech is low.
Where tyranny is high liberty is low.
Where shame is high honor is low.
Where guilt is high innocence is low.
Where illusion is high reality is low.
Where bitterness is high happiness is low.
Where want is high needs is low.
Where pain is high pleasure is low.
Where fear is high love is low.
Where trouble is high com ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

I had to work so hard to find myself again, Alexandr." There was pain in her voice. "I was so lost without you. You left me raw and wounded and trapped in a dark place with no windows or doors. I didn't know how to live without you. I didn't know how to smile or feel or be. It took almost two years before I really accepted that it was over and I had to find a way to go on. I made myself strong. I'm alive again. I can wake up some mornings and be happy. I can look at the ocean and find peace again. Now you're asking me to risk everything all over again and I'm not certain I could survive if it all came crashing down. ~ Christine Feehan

So pointless to play over how our years might have been put to better use. They can't be recovered now. We do well not to grieve on and on. Ancient voices may have much to tell, but no one's listening. ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

But he wasn't that man anymore. He had lost too much, and in his loss, he'd thrown more away. ~ Kristin Hannah

But when you're writing a script - for me anyway - you have to sort of create an enforced innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot, what movies are not hot, what the budget of this movie might be. ~ David Cronenberg

The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites. ~ Katherine Dunn

You're not going to lose me again," aku berjanji. "You've never lost me in the first place anyway."
Dapat kurasakan dirinya tersenyum dalam rangkulanku. "And you've never lost me either. ~ Winna Efendi

It is I who have watched over thee, life after life, in the tenderness of many mothers! See in My gaze the two black eyes, the lost beautiful eyes, thou seekest! ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

You don't know how easy death is. It's - it's like a door. A person simply walks through it, and she's lost to you forever. ~ Eloisa James

He changed us both." She seemed to struggle for words. "I think of you, all that you lost, who you were, what you were forced to be, and might have been, and I - I have become this, this person, unable to - "
She shut her mouth.
"Kestrel," he said softly, "I love this person. ~ Marie Rutkoski

The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. Zen suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as madmen or innocents, we are already there. It might be good to open our eyes and see. ~ Thomas Merton

Without pain, there's no beauty, Max. The beauty is worth the price."

Not for everyone. Not even for most.

"That is every individual person's decision to make. I want to make that choice for my - "

Choice is an illusion.

We're standing in the freezing surf.

"What is it you want, Max?"

To not be afraid that Brian, or you, or some other entity, whether bio or artificial, is going to unmake me. To not fear your death.

"Better to have loved and lost - "

No. It's not. I have consumed every recorded reflection of human existence. Every book, every painting, every piece of music, every film. Consciousness is a horror show. You search for glimpses of beauty to justify your existence. ~ Blake Crouch

It's the ones who are lost who need to be found the most. ~ Tiffany Daune

The idea of love walked along the water and her gaze was full of absence and her eyes spat lighting. The impressionable evening received by turns the imprints of grasses, clouds, bodies, and wore crazy astronomical designs. The idea of love walked straight ahead without seeing anything; she was wearing tiny isosceles mirrors whose perfect assemblage was amazing. They were so many images of fish tails, when, by their angelic nature, they answer the promise one might make of always finding each other again. Finding each other again even in the depths of a forest, where the thread of a star is an articulation more silent than life, the dawn a liquor stronger than blood. Who is lost, who truly wanders off when a cup of coffee is steaming in the fog and waiters dressed in snow circulate patiently on the surface of floors whose desired height can be indicated with one's hands? Who? A solitary man whom the idea of love has just left and who tucks in his spirit like an imaginary bed. The man falls all the same and in the next room, under the moon-white verandah, a woman rises whom the idea of love has abandoned. The gravel weeps outside, a rain of glass is falling in which we recognize small chains, tears in which we have time to see ourselves, mirror tears, shards of windows, singular crystals like the ones we witness in our hand on awakening, leaves and the faded petals of those roses that once embelished certain distillery bottles. It's just that the idea of love, it seems angry w ~ Andre Breton

No love without a little innocence. Where was the innocence? Empires were tumbling down; nations and men were tearing at one another's throats; our hands were soiled. Originally innocent without knowing it, we were now guilty without meaning to be: the mystery was increasing with our knowledge. ~ Albert Camus

It's a new battle, no matter If I won or lost the last one, this is a new battle & the only thing to take forward is the lesson from the last one, if I won – why & how I won, & if I lost – why & how I lost. I will enter this battle wearing my confidence, carrying a sword (which will be my efforts) & a shield (which will be the lessons learned from previous battles). Now defeat me if you can… ~ ShahenshahHK

It is possible to be a fan of reality TV, talent shows and bubblegum pop and still have a brain. You will also see that a great many people know perfectly well how silly and camp and trivial their fandom is. They do not check in their minds when they enter a fan site. Judgement is not necessarily fled to brutish beasts, and men have not quite lost their reason. Which is all a way of questioning whether pop-culture hero worship is really so psychically damaging, so erosive of cognitive faculties, so corrupting of the soul of mankind as we are so often told. ~ Stephen Fry

The terrible fatalism which had overcome me of late had taken on an even more terrible form; drowning in the disintegration of family, of both countries to which I had belonged, of everything which can sanely be called real, lost in the sorrow of my filthy unrequited love, I sought out the oblivion of - I'm making it sound too noble; no otorund phrases must be used. Baldly, then: I rode the night-streets of the city, looking for death. ~ Salman Rushdie

Nondistraction means not being lost in subtle undercurrents of delusion or indifferent stupor ... ~ Thinley Norbu

Our society has lost confidence in the power of reason, except perhaps scientific reason. ~ Timothy Radcliffe

...I see fetal sciences in you,
mummified poems, and bones
of my romantic secrets
and old innocence.

Shall I hang you on the wall
of my emotional museum,
beside the dark, chill,
sleeping irises of my evil?

Or shall I spread you over the pines
―suffering book of my love―
so you can learn about the song
the nightingale offers the dawn?... ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Never again the music blown as brightly
Off of my heart as foam blown off a wave;
Never again the melody that lightly
Caressed my grief and healed the wounds it gave.

Never again–I hear my dark thoughts clashing
Sullen and blind as waves that beat a wall–
Age that is coming, summer that is going,
All I have lost or never found at all. ~ Sara Teasdale

It's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It's that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They'll go down in the same order. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

While Cinder walked down the endless black-carpeted aisle, she tried not to think of all the people in the universe who were watching her. She tried not to wonder whether they were judging her or admiring her, afraid of her or impressed by her. She tried not to guess how many saw her as the lost princess or a pathetic cyborg, a vigilante or a criminal, a revolutionary or a mechanic that had gotten lucky.
She tried not to think about the smear of yellow frosting on her priceless gown.
Kai and Winter stood at the altar encased in the light of glowing orbs, Winter holding the queen's crown and Kai a ceremonial scepter. Together, they represented how both Earth and Luna would accept her right to rule. The rest of her friends were in their reserved seats in the front row. Thorne, on the aisle, held out his hand as Cinder passed. She snorted and accepted the high five before floating up the stairs.
Winter winked at her. "Well done, Cinder-friend. You didn't trip. The hard part is over."
Kai gave a smile meant for only Cinder, even though the entire universe was watching. "She's right, that really is the hard part."
"Thank the stars," Cinder whispered back. "Now let's get this over with."
Taking a long shaky breath, she turned to face her kingdom. ~ Marissa Meyer

If no one cares whether you are
living or dying, then choose living.

What have you lost when you still have God."

- Khadija Rupa. ~ Khadija Rupa

On the rare occasions when I spend a night in Oxford, the keeping of the hours by the clock towers in New College, and Merton, and the great booming of Tom tolling 101 times at 9 pm at Christ Church are inextricably interwoven with memories and regrets and lost joys. The sound almost sends me mad, so intense are the feelings it evokes. ~ A. N. Wilson

Once again I have told you so little, and have asked no questions, and once again I must close. But not a single answer and, even more certainly, not a single question shall be lost. There exists some kind of sorcery by which two people, without seeing each other, without talking to each other, can at least discover the greater part about each other's past, literally in a flash, without having to tell each other all and everything; but this, after all, is almost an instrument of Black Magic (without seeming to be) which, although never without reward, one would certainly never resort to with impunity. Therefore I won't say it, unless you guess it first. It is terribly short, like all magic formulas. Farewell, and let me reinforce this greeting by lingering over your hand.
Yours, Franz K. ~ Franz Kafka

Being a human being is lost. For 120 shows, the one that goes bad is the one that people will talk about. ~ Ryan Adams