The Black Prince
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Important Quotations Explained
"I shall in telling it adopt the modern technique of narration, allowing the narrating consciousness to pass like a light along its series of present moments, aware of the past, unaware of what is to come."
"Of course we argue sometimes. Marriage is a long journey in close quarters. Of course nerves get frayed. Every married person is a Jekyll and Hyde, they've got to be."
"Arnold Baffin is a fluent writer. He is a prolific writer. It may well be this facility which is his own worst enemy. It is a quality which can be mistaken for imagination. And if the artist himself so mistakes it he is doomed. The writer who is facile needs, to become a writer of any merit, quality about all; and that is courage: the courage to destroy, the courage to wait."
She had filled me with some previously unimaginable power which I knew I could and would use in my art. The deep causes of the universe, the stars, and the 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."
"She had managed to tell me that she was writing under duress. She had also managed to convey her destination. "Snow and ice" to which she had drawn attention, patently meant Venice. The Italian for "snow" is "neve," and together with the reference to "Italian words," the anagram was obvious. And in "topsy- turvy" language a little place in the mountains clearly meant a large place by the sea."
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