The Black Prince Love Quotes

What follows is in its essence as well as in its contour a love story. I mean that it is deeply as well as superficially so. Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story. (Editor's Foreword: par. 2)

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story. (Editor's Foreword: par. 3)

My mother was very important to me. I loved her, but always with a kind of anguish. I feared loss and death to an extent I think unusual in a child. Later I sensed with profound distress the hopeless lack of understanding which existed between my parents. They could not 'see' each other at all. (1.9.1)

Of course I never loved Priscilla in the way that I loved my mother. But I felt identified with her and vulnerable through her. I often felt ashamed of her. (1.9.2)

Of course I was 'in love' with Christian when I married her, and I felt that I was lucky to get her. She was a showy pretty woman. […] Later, when I imagined I knew more about 'love', I decided that my feeling about Christian was 'just' overwhelming sexual attraction, plus a curious element of obsession. It was as if I had known Christian as a real woman in some previous incarnation, and were now reliving, perhaps as a punishment, some doomed perverted spiritual pattern. (1.10.2)

'All things work together for good for those who love God,' said Saint Paul. Possibly: but what is it to love God? I have never seen this happening. There is, my dear friend and mentor, some hard-won calm when we see the world very detailed and very close: as close and as vivid as the newly painted funnels of ships on a sunny evening. But the dark and the ugly is not washed away, this too is seen, and the horror of the world is part of the world. There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good. (1.12.4)

'I had fallen in love with Julian.' The words are easily written down. But how to describe the thing itself? It is odd that falling in love, though frequently mentioned in literature, is rarely adequately described. It is after all an astounding phenomenon and for most people it is the most astonishing event that ever happens to them: more astonishing, because more counter-natural, than life's horrors. (2.1.2)

The conventional notion of the Christian God pictures Him as having created and being about to judge. A more intimate theology, and one more consonant with the nature of what we know of love, pictures a demonic force engaged in continuous creation and participation. I felt that I was, at every instant, creating Julian and supporting her being with my own. At the same time I saw her too in every way as I had seen her before. I saw her simplicity, her ignorance, her childish unkindness, her unpretty anxious face. She was not beautiful or brilliantly clever. How false it is to say that love is blind. (2.1.6)

Of course since everything was now connected with Julian, my ambitions as a writer were connected with Julian. But they were not cancelled thereby. Rather something more like the opposite seemed to be happening. She had filled me with a previously unimaginable power which I knew that I would and could use in my art. The deep causes of the universe, the stars, the distant galaxies, the ultimate particles of matter, had fashioned these two things, my love and my art, as aspects of what was ultimately one and the same. They were, I knew, from the same source. (2.1.8)

Every artist is a masochist to his own muse, that pleasure at least belongs to him intimately. And indeed our highest moments may find us still the hero of such conceptions. But they are false conceptions all the same. And the black Eros whom I loved and feared was but an insubstantial shadow of a greater and more terrible godhead. (Postscript by Bradley Pearson: par. 20)