Innocence Quotes
"Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together."
"Throughout our lives, each of us needs warmth and seeks light."
"Those of us who remain hidden from everyone else, however, know that this world is wondrous and filled with mysteries."
"To live in the city of crowds and traffic and constant noise, to be always striving, to be in the ceaseless competition for money and status and power, perhaps distracted the mind until it could no longer see — and forgot — the all that is."
"We were an enduring dynasty of the dispossessed, living in the secret city that the city’s people never saw."
"By the standards of humanity, we were exceedingly ugly in a way that excited in them abhorrence and the most terrible rage."
"The more familiar that a place becomes, the more mysterious it becomes, as well, if you are alert to the truth of things."
"A city is half beast and half machine, with arteries of fresh water and veins of foul, nerves of telephone and electrical cables, sewer lines for bowels, pipes full of pressurized steam and others carrying gas, valves and fans and filters and meters and motors and transformers and tens of thousands of interlinked computers, and though its people sleep, the city never does."
"We have all been brought into the world for some reason, and we must wonder why and hope to learn."
"The night offers much the same. I’ve seen things that I don’t understand but that nonetheless delight me."
"Love is absorbing, related to affection but stronger, full of appreciation for — and delight in — the other person."
"Sometimes I think there may be more truth in fiction than in real life."
"They were of little interest to the cab driver, who no doubt lived by a hear-no-see-no-evil code."
"Loss can be an incandescent terror equal to any flames."
"The world has infinite charms if you wish to see them."
"The world’s many mysteries fascinate me and inspire in me a hope so profound."
"In spite of being mechanical, the music had at first struck me as sparkling, effervescent."
"A taxi rounded the corner a block away, the driver glorying in the speed that daytime streets did not allow."
"The outlaws weren’t all tucked in their beds or playing video games, however, because we came upon four of them during our explorations."
"I was overwhelmed by the feeling that when I’d closed the bedroom window, I hadn’t latched it, and that someone or maybe something was at that minute climbing the fire escape and soon to enter the apartment with bad intentions."
"So tender did this feeling become that I knew I was losing the degree of self-control that I needed every minute that I was aboveground."
"Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies."
"Nature is an exquisite machine that is never violent except when contending forces within it need to be rebalanced."
"Death is here tonight. Not just with Simon. Death is with us."
"Although they have the teeth to tear, it is by swish of tail and yearning eyes that they most easily get what they want."
"Insanity is rapidly becoming the new normal."
"I fancied that they were tiny airships aboard which minute passengers were bound from their world to another peopled by their Lilliputian kind."
"Every human cell, with its thousands of protein chains, is more complex than a 747 or the largest cruise ship."
"No, honey. Your mother’s gone. She’s never coming back. You’re safe now."
"The great beauty of their incandescent descent chilled my heart."
"The love of power in the service of mass death."
"You have a purity, an innocence that the rest of us can sense in an instant."
"The story might have been told with animals in all the roles, such as Tortoise and Hare, Cat and Mouse, Lambkin and Little Fish, Hen and Mr. Fox."
"The effect she had on him might be proof of some psychic ability that she was too young to be able to control."
"Eccentric or imperious, or even if mentally unbalanced by grief, he was treated respectfully."
"Bailey needed such a relative innocent to assist him with the care of his newborn and motherless daughter."
"Sister Gabriel was a mystic with an awareness beyond the five senses."
"Bailey knew it to be true, as well, the moment that he heard it."
"By the time I began to imagine the shape of the immediate future, Gwyneth already knew what came next."
"In every way, you are so beautiful, and you will be beautiful forever."
"The very sight of Gwyneth troubled her but also filled her heart with gladness."
"She and her father believed that hers was to be a life in waiting."
"The involuntary examination of his conscience occurred when he but looked at the girl."
"Gwyneth's reclusive, almost monastic, existence was due to her father's protection."
"The world was run by our free will, and if they were to step down from their ledges and rooftops to undo what had been done, they would take from humanity our free will."
"If death should be forgotten, that might not be as good a thing as it at first seems to be."
"The only thing that survives is love, for it is an energy as enduring as light."
"We must remember that by claiming the power of death and using it to control others, we lost a world and in fact more than a world."