48 Quotes About Loss-of-innocence

Three men and they all took something from me: my affection, my promise, and my innocence. What has love given me...? Nothing. Nothing but pain.

Loss is like a wind, it either carries you to a new destination or it traps you in an ocean of stagnation. You must quickly learn how to navigate the sail, for stagnation is death.

I no longer believe that people are born without virtue. It gets beaten out. Misfortune threshes our souls as a flail threshes wheat, and the lightest parts of ourselves are scattered to the wind.

I don't have any first times left... I hope that's OK.

I'm lying in my room listening to the birds outside. I used to think they sang because they were happy. But then I learned on a nature show they're really showing off. Trying to lure in some other bird so they can mate with it. Or let the other birds know not to get too close to their turf. I wish I never watched that show, because now all I think about is what those pretty sounds mean. And how they're not pretty at all.

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.

Grisha, a fat, solemn little person of seven, was standing by the kitchen door listening and peeping through the keyhole.

The girl was holding out her hand, but I could only give a pathetic shrug. I had nothing to give her. I'd finally faded away.

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.