#innocence

In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning. ↗

— A. E. Housman

#american #conceal #cunning #diabolical #every

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

#european #generation #innocence #joined #life

The child's naive dream of life is the only one worth having. ↗

— Marty Rubin

#innocence #dreams

There are many more layers to innocence than one might ever imagine, and we are ever unaware of them until each barrier is breached. ↗

— Paula Reed

#imagination

The United States government can indict you on something, and now you've got to prove your innocence. And that's not the Constitution of the United States. ↗

— Leonard Peltier

#got #government #indict #innocence #now

He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music. ↗

— Mark Helprin

#horse #innocence #truth #beauty

She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#innocence #insanity #beauty

He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#beauty

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#government #innocence #law #libertarian #men

Yet, when a man stands in the midst of his own beautifications, in the midst of his own northern airs of taciturnity and reservation, and not in the vanity and shortcoming of a woman's vestures, nor adornments; he is likely to see gliding past him silent, magical creatures whose happiness and seclusion he yearns for- his own mistakes, his own wounds, his own shortcomings: and that is no meager happiness. Yet, even with this yearning, even with that yearning for truth, for innocence in expression, man almost believes that his greater self lives there amongst the shortcomings, the humiliations, and the injuries: in these quiet regions even the fiercest air, even the howling air, turns into deathly silence, and in the most palest of northern snows, where you will find the white bear, youth itself even turns into a dream of youth. How he moves over these hilltops, like an enormous moth into the sun! But what is the sun for him, when there is no such thing as warmth? ↗

— Parodties

#innocence #renewal #youth #death