Quote 1
It took me a long time to learn where he came from. The little prince, who asked me so many questions, never seemed to hear the ones I asked him. It was from words dropped by chance that, little by little, everything was revealed to me. (3.1)
Of course, “a long time” is relative – they’re not in the desert for that long.Still, the prince is unique because he doesn’t shove his life story down the narrator’s throat. Instead, he withholds it, which makes the narrator more interested. The prince shares such few details and clues that the narrator just becomes more and more determined to learn the truth about him. Like Encyclopedia Brown or Sherlock Holmes.
Quote 2
I had thus learned a second fact of great importance: this was that the planet the little prince came from was scarcely any larger than a house! (4.1)
Throughout the book, the narrator tells us what matters and what doesn’t. Each idea or fact has value, some much more than others. This “second fact” has “great” value. The prince is an alien. He isn’t from our (or the narrator’s world). He’s from another planet, and a tiny one at that. The narrator even emphasizes the “great importance” of this fact by putting in an exclamation mark!
Quote 3
On the fifth day—again, as always, it was thanks to the sheep—the secret of the little prince’s life was revealed to me. Abruptly, without anything to lead up to it, and as if the question had been born of long and silent meditation on his problem, he demanded:
“A sheep, if it eats little bushes, does it eat flowers, too?” (7.1-2)
It takes five days for the narrator to get to know the prince and learn something “essential” about him—his concern for his flower.
Quote 4
But she interrupted herself at that point. She had come in the form of a seed. She could not have known anything of any other worlds. Embarrassed over having let herself be caught on the verge of such a naïve untruth, she coughed two or three times, in order to put the little prince in the wrong. (8.21)
Oh, very cute, flower. But a strategy that might come in handy if we’re ever caught telling a lie.
Quote 5
Fortunately, however, for the reputation of Asteroid B-612, a Turkish dictator made a law that his subjects, under pain of death, should change to European costume. So in 1920 the astronomer gave his demonstration all over again, dressed with impressive style and elegance. And this time everybody accepted his report. (4.7)
The astronomer’s facts don’t change at all. He’s always right about the existence of Asteroid B-612. However, until he changes his outer appearance, people don’t believe his facts. He has to be wearing a specific type of outfit for his ideas to be accepted by the adults. Once he changes his outfit, it’s like his ideas are brand new. People “accept” them without any problems, just because of how he’s dressed. Has that ever happened to you?
Quote 6
In certain more important details I shall make mistakes, also. But that is something that will not be my fault. My friend never explained anything to me. He thought, perhaps, that I was like himself. But I, alas, do not know how to see sheep through the walls of boxes. Perhaps I am a little like the grown-ups. I have had to grow old. (4.15)
Poor narrator guy. This comment that he makes is kind of sad. We know, because he keeps on saying so, that the narrator thinks most adults don’t understand what really matters. He doesn’t feel an affinity for them. That’s a fancy way of saying he doesn’t think he sees eye-to-eye with other adults.
What do we mean by this? Well, he feels like the odd one out: they don’t have the same kind of understanding. Grown-ups don’t view the world in the same way. But, as much as the narrator wants to be able to view the world with imagination and innocence, like the child that he used to be, he fears he may not have as much imagination as the prince he meets. Has he changed too much from the child he once was?
Quote 7
But the shrub soon stopped growing, and began to get ready to produce a flower. The little prince, who was present at the first appearance of a huge bud, felt at once that some sort of miraculous apparition must emerge from it. (8.2)
The prince predicts the transformation that will take place when his shrub (a rosebush) gets ready to bloom. He expects that it will end up being a “miraculous apparition.”
Well, it both is and isn’t. The apparition ends up being his rose, which is a flower unlike any other. The flower is special to him. However, the flower doesn’t turn into a young lady, or a fairy, or a poodle. Instead, it changes into the best version of itself – a rose in full bloom – and that is enough to amaze the prince.
Quote 8
I realized clearly that something extraordinary was happening. I was holding him close in my arms as if he were a little child; and yet it seemed to me that he was rushing headlong toward an abyss from which I could do nothing to restrain him… (26.23)
Here’s that separation between inside and outside again. On the surface, which the narrator can see, the prince still looks like “a little child.” If the prince really was just a little child, the narrator would be able to take care of him and boss him around. The narrator would be able to keep him from going to get bitten by the snake. But, on the inside, it seems, the prince may be much more mature than the narrator. On the inside, the prince is going places where the narrator can’t follow. His inside is changing dramatically, while his surface remains the same.
Quote 9
For I do not want any one to read my book carelessly. I have suffered too much grief in setting down these memories. Six years have already passed since my friend went away from me, with his sheep. If I try to describe him here, it is to make sure that I shall not forget him. To forget a friend is sad. Not every one has had a friend. And if I forget him, I may become like the grown-ups who are no longer interested in anything but figures… (4.13)
The narrator wants us readers to be clear about how important this story is. He says it’s been really rough on him just to write everything down. When he lost the prince, he lost a friend. Now, he’s scared of losing his memories of that friend, too.
Quote 10
Oh, little prince! Bit by bit I came to understand the secrets of your sad little life… For a long time you had found your only entertainment in the quiet pleasure of looking at the sunset. I learned that new detail on the morning of the fourth day […] (6.1)
When the prince was back on his own planet (before he began any of his adventures), he didn’t really have the most awesome times. His “only entertainment” was “the quiet pleasure of looking at the sunset.” In other words, he had no X-Box, candy bars, or Internet. And worst of all, he didn’t even have anyone to talk to.
Quote 11
I had drunk the water. I breathed easily. At sunrise the sand is the colour of honey. And that honey colour was making me happy, too. What brought me, then, this sense of grief? (25.20)
This is a moment that feels pretty weird to the narrator. He’s got several things going on that are “making [him] happy.” He’s got water in the desert. And he’s got a sunrise, making the world full of beautiful color. Woot, right? Yet, with all of that, he is puzzled by the fact that he feels sad, too—perhaps because he senses that the prince will be leaving him soon.
Quote 12
And now six years have already gone by… I have never yet told this story. The companions who met me on my return were well content to see me alive. I was sad, but I told them: “I am tired.”
Now my sorrow is comforted a little. That is to say—not entirely. But I know that he did go back to his planet, because I did not find his body at daybreak. It was not such a heavy body… And at night I love to listen to the stars. It is like five hundred million little bells… (27.1-2)
At the end of the book we’re pretty close to where we started, with the narrator thinking about how long it’s been since he had his encounter with the prince. When he first parted from the prince, he “was sad”; six years later, he’s still full of “sorrow.” Although he says the sorrow’s gotten a little better, it’s still there. Looks like losing someone like the prince isn’t something you can get over very quickly.
Quote 13
The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand, a thousand miles from any human habitation. I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Thus you can imagine my amazement, at sunrise, when I was awakened by an odd little voice. (2.2)
When the narrator first crashes in the desert, he expects to be there alone. It’s kind of funny, isn’t it, that he compares himself—someone stuck in the middle of a desert—to someone stuck in the middle of a huge body of water? It’s as though anything from the natural world that’s expansive, whether it’s sand or water, treats small, helpless people in the same way.
Quote 14
“For the sunset. We must wait until it is time.”
At first you seemed to be very much surprised. And then you laughed to yourself. You said to me:
“I am always thinking that I am at home!” (6.5-7)
In the prince’s version of how things are, it’s normal to see a sunset when you want to—you just have to scoot your chair over to the section of your tiny planet on which the sun is setting. But in our reality, things work differently, which the prince finds strange.
Quote 15
So he cleaned out the extinct volcano, too. If they are well cleaned out, volcanoes burn slowly and steadily, without any eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are like fires in a chimney.
On our earth we are obviously much too small to clean out our volcanoes. That is why they bring no end of trouble upon us. (9.1-2)
Sounds so logical, doesn’t it? We almost believe it. Almost. Clearly, our narrator’s version of reality is also just a tiny bit warped. Don’t try to sweep out a volcano! You’d set your pants on fire.
Quote 16
“Yes,” I said to the little prince. “The house, the stars, the desert—what gives them their beauty is something that is invisible!” (24.25)
This isn’t about entering a new world – it’s about looking at your own world differently. The narrator is finding “beauty,” now, in what he can’t see, rather than in what he can: in “something that is invisible.” That’s something the prince taught him – and something the fox taught the prince.
Quote 17
Here, then, is a great mystery. For you who also love the little prince, and for me, nothing in the universe can be the same if somewhere, we do not know where, a sheep that we never saw has—yes or no?—eaten a rose… (27.7)
Is this the ultimate icebreaker/getting to know someone question? Even better than “Cat person or dog person?” In other words, this idea might provide a great test to show what kind of person you are: whether you can look at the “universe” the way the narrator does or not. Do you believe in the “great mystery”? Do you think the sheep has “eaten a rose,” or is that rose safe? It’s like asking whether you believe in magic, and beauty, and wonder.
Quote 18
For I do not want any one to read my book carelessly. I have suffered too much grief in setting down these memories. Six years have already passed since my friend went away from me, with his sheep. If I try to describe him here, it is to make sure that I shall not forget him. To forget a friend is sad. Not every one has had a friend. And if I forget him, I may become like the grown-ups who are no longer interested in anything but figures… (4.13)
In this paragraph, the narrator’s sadness and ideas about friendship collide. He can’t think about his friendship with the prince without being sad that the prince has left. The idea that he might “forget a friend is sad.” Do you agree? Why or why not?
Quote 19
I had let my tools drop from my hands. Of what moment now was my hammer, my bolt, or thirst, or death? On one star, one planet, my planet, the Earth, there was a little prince to be comforted. I took him in my arms, and rocked him. (7.32)
This friendship with the prince inspires the narrator to be less selfish. When the narrator sees his friend is unhappy, he drops everything to comfort him. The narrator says that his hammer and bolt aren’t important compared to the prince’s grief, which is understandable—but he also says “thirst” and “death” aren’t as important either. He must really care about the prince!
Quote 20
I did not know what to say to him. I felt awkward and blundering. I did not know how I could reach him, where I could overtake him and go on hand in hand with him once more.
It is such a secret place, the land of tears. (7.34-5)
Even when you have a great friend, that friendship doesn’t mean you can do everything together. As much as the narrator cares for and sympathizes with the prince, the narrator can’t follow him “hand in hand” into the “land of tears” – in other words, it is impossible to really, truly understand someone else’s sorrow. Do you agree?