The Light Princess Quotes

″‘My dear child,’ said the king, “you must be aware by this time that you are not exactly like other people.‘”

″‘How do you like falling in?’ said the princess. ‘Beyond everything,’ answered he; ‘for I have fallen in with the only perfect creature I ever saw.’

“Then she would laugh like the very spirit of fun; only in her laugh there was something missing. What it was, I find myself unable to describe. I think it was a certain tone, depending upon the possibility of sorrow—morbidezza, perhaps. She never smiled.”

“But at the same time she seemed more sedate than usual. Perhaps that was because a great pleasure spoils laughing.”

“One day he lost sight of his retinue in a great forest. These forests are very useful in delivering princes from their courtiers, like a sieve that keeps back the bran. Then the princes get away to follow their fortunes. In this they have the advantage of the princesses, who are forced to marry before they have had a bit of fun. I wish our princesses got lost in a forest sometimes.”

“But the lake, your highness!” said the chamberlain, who, roused by the noise, came in, in his nightcap. “Go and drown yourself in it!” she said. This was the last rudeness of which the princess was ever guilty; and one must allow that she had good cause to feel provoked with the lord chamberlain.

“Perhaps the best thing for the princess would have been to fall in love. But how a princess who had no gravity could fall into anything is a difficulty—perhaps the difficulty. As for her own feelings on the subject, she did not even know that there was such a beehive of honey and stings to be fallen into.”

“What business had you to pull me down out of the water, and throw me to the bottom of the air? I never did you any harm.”