Parenting & Family Quote by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt’s line punctures a comforting myth: that childhood is a moral clean room, sealed off from appetite, cruelty, calculation, and shame. The bite comes from the word “project,” a quiet psychoanalytic jab that turns “innocence” into an adult need rather than a child’s natural condition. Adults aren’t merely mistaken; they’re doing something to children with this belief, draping them in a costume that flatters the grown-ups’ story about themselves.

The subtext is unsentimental and slightly accusatory. “Innocence” becomes a kind of cultural alibi: if children are pure, then adults get to imagine corruption as something that arrives later, from the outside, like a virus. Tartt suggests the opposite. Kids have inner lives that are messy, strategic, erotic in budding ways, and often surprisingly perceptive about power. Adults prefer not to look too closely because it would force a reckoning with how early social forces begin - class, gender, desire, violence, status. The fantasy of innocence keeps that reckoning at bay.

Coming from Tartt, a novelist obsessed with moral ambiguity and the private theater of consciousness, it reads like a manifesto for her fiction. Her young characters aren’t angels; they’re narrators with blind spots, actors in adult worlds, sometimes complicit in the very darkness adults claim to be protecting them from. The line doesn’t romanticize childhood; it demands we stop using it as a sentimental prop.