“When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean.”
The Reivers (1962)
Context: When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it, which is not innocence but appetite; his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it, which is not ignorance but size. But Boon didn't know this. He must seduce me. And he had so little time: only from the time the train left until dark.
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William Faulkner 214
American writer 1897–1962Related quotes
“Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.”
(zh-TW) 少小離家老大回，鄉音無改鬢毛衰。
兒童相見不相識，笑問客從何處來。
"Coming Home" (《回乡偶书》) in Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty, trans. Witter Bynner
“Dont speak of tomorrow. Let the music speak to us tonight, in a happier language than ours.”
Variant: Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.
Source: The Woman in White
“To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.”
"Chekhov, Coltrane, and Democracy: Interview by David Lionel Smith." in The Cornel West Reader (1998)
“What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.”
Source: Intimacy: das Buch zum Film von Patrice Chéreau
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Context: I've always believed that there is no subject that is taboo for the writer. It is how it is written that makes a book acceptable, as a work of art, or unacceptable and pornographic. There are many books circulating today, for the teen-ager as well as the grown up, which would not have been printed in the fifties. It is still amazing to me that A Wrinkle In Time was considered too difficult for children. My children were seven, ten, and twelve while I was writing it, and they understood it. The problem is not that it's too difficult for children, but that it's too difficult for grown ups. Much of the world view of Einstein's thinking wasn't being taught when the grown ups were in school, but the children were comfortably familiar with it.