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Exlpore more Innocence quotes
"The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe."
"Instead of a criminal or a drug addict, I was looking at a boy - just a boy."
"When Tana was six, vampires were Muppets, endlessly counting, or cartoon villains in black cloaks with red polyester lining."
"It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile."
"No mind seems more peaceful than the mind of a sleeping innocent child because life has not yet planted the seeds of sorrow in that mind!"
"Innocence has a grace which intelligence lacks!"
Explore more quotes by Joan Didion
"As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become..."
"More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which seems to illustrate, as in a child's primer, that the production ethic led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living."
"It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive."
"My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry. I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch. I would still remember to renew my passport. Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life."
"It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?"
"We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not.... We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget."
"We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all."
"And except on a certain kind of winter evening-six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that-except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it."
"I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world."
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