“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence.”
—
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, from The Little Prince (via graceebooks)
This was weirding me out because I recently reread The Little Prince and couldn’t for the life of me remember getting to this part. I figured it was a different edition or translation or something. Turns out the attribution is only half-right: while Saint-Exupery was in fact the originator of this quote, it cannot be found in the novella. Instead, he wrote it in a letter to Natalie Paley.
« Bien sûr je te ferai mal. Bien sûr tu me feras mal. Bien sûr nous aurons mal, mais ça c’est la condition de l’existence. Se faire printemps c’est prendre le risque de l’hiver. Se faire présent c’est prendre le risque de l’absence. »
“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence means accepting the risk of absence.”
[image from here, scanned from Les plus beaux manuscrits de Saint-Exupéry (Editions de la Martinière)]
