Sometimes we fall in love with a book just because we are moved by some details.The Little Prince is a book that seems to be written for children because of its plain language and simple story clues. In fact, however,it's a book for people of all ages. And adults are even more likely moved by the book than kids because they can have better understandings of the implications suggested by the details. Here I want to share with you some of my favorite excerpts.
From Chapter 21
"My life is very monotonous," the fox said."I haunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I'm a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step, that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the green-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be, when you have tamed me. The green, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…"
The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.
"You're not at all like my rose," he said."As yet you're nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You're like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."
…
"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, An ordinary passerby would think that My rose looked just like you——the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put undet the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars; because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing, because she's my rose.
"Goodbye" said the fox, "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with a heart that one can see rightly;what is essentia is invisible to the eye."
"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."
I love those words, because they lead me to self-examination and make me rethink my life. I love this book not because of the interesting stories in it, but the implications suggested by the stories.