The Black Prince

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.

We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.

I've been so unhappy for years, so unhappy . . . I don't understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.

The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, both for our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvelously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so nearly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these beings who fall so regularly out of awareness into a fantasm-infested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain.

I have nobody in the world. I'll kill myself. That's best. Everyone will say, It's for the best that she killed herself, she's better off dead . . . I hate myself so much I could spend hours and hours just screaming with hatred and with the pain of it, oh the pain of it . . .

Love generates, or rather reveals, something which may be called absolute charm. In the beloved nothing is gauche. Every move of the head, every tone of the voice, every laugh or grunt or cough or twitch of the nose is as valuable and revealing as a glimpse of paradise.

Most friendships are a sort of frozen and undeveloping semi-hostility.

Only take someone's hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.

I tried deep breathing, but seemed to lose contact with myself between each breath, so that the next one was always an emergency. I began to feel faint.

An experience is richest not talked of.

Once in an endless meadow, just able to peer through the tawny haze of the grass tops, the child who was myself had watched a young fox catching mice, an elegant newly minted fox, straight from the hand of God, brilliantly ruddy, with black stockings and a white-tipped brush. The fox heard and turned. I saw its intense vivid mask, its liquid amber eyes. Then it was gone. An image of such beauty and such mysterious sense. The child wept and knew himself an artist.

Oh my life is so awful, it's just so awful to be me, you don't know what it's like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there.

She was a spoiler, a needler, an underminer, a diminisher, simply by instinct.

Let me sleep at last. I've had misery enough in my life. You said there was nowhere to go to. There is death to go to. I've had misery enough in my life.

It was not simply that I frenziedly desired what I could not have. That was but a blunt and unrefined kind of suffering. I was condemned to be with her even in her very rejection of me. And how long and how slow and how long-drawn-out that rejection would be. Still temptation would follow where she was. Endlessly she would give herself to others taking me with her. Like an obscene puny familiar I would sit in the corners of bedrooms where she kissed and loved. She would make consort with my foes, she would adore those that mocked me, she would drink contempt for me from alien lips. And all the time my very soul would travel with her, invisible and crying soundlessly with pain.

Only sometimes at night when I think that you live now and are somewhere, I shed tears.

I need love, I've never felt more in need of it than now. I feel so terribly terribly unhappy.

The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.

I have seen much of human beings over a long period, and I have learnt how little good to expect from them.

I've thought about nothing else but you.

You've obviously never been in love." "I have actually. And awfully. And—always—without hope—I've never had my love reciprocated ever.

All chances of happiness are gone from me. Just being with myself is hell all the time anyway.

What the cold light showed me was that my situation was simply unlivable. I wanted, with a desire greater than any desire which I had ever conceived could exist without instantly killing its owner by spontaneous combustion, something which I simply could not have.

But I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always.

I crave for love, everybody does . . . and I've never had a bloody crumb of it—and I've given so much love to people—I can really love people, I can, I let them walk over me—but nobody's ever loved me.

It's not my fault! It can't make any difference, can it?" "You understand nothing. You are a destroyer, a black spiteful destroyer. You are the sort of person who goes around in a dream smashing things . . . You aren't really here at all.

I felt so ashamed with them because everything in their life was going so well and they were so sort of successful. I couldn't talk about what I wanted with them and they were always in a hurry.

Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.

I just want to serve and help people and be good to everybody, only it always goes wrong somehow—I think about suicide all the time, every bloody day I want to die and stop this torture, but I go crawling on . . . I'm so Christ-awful bloody lonely I could scream with it for hours on end.