Quote 10
“If I owned a silk scarf,” he said, “I could put it around my neck and take it away with me. If I owned a flower, I could pluck that flower and take it away with me. But you cannot pluck the stars from heaven…”
“No. But I can put them in the bank.” (13.42-3)
Here’s a big difference of opinion between two characters who inhabit different versions of reality. The prince sees the stars as they appear in the sky, or “from heaven.” You can see them but you can’t touch or hold them, like you could small objects like “a silk scarf” or a flower. For that reason, he thinks, people can’t possess the stars. But the businessman thinks you can own anything, just by saying you do. If you can count it, for example, you can own it.
Quote 11
“All men have stars,” he answered, “but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travellers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they are wealth. But all these stars are silent. You—you alone—will have the stars as no one else has them—”
“What are you trying to say?”
“In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night… You—only you—will have stars that can laugh!” (26.18-20)
Things can mean different things depending on how you perceive them. Because of their friendship, the prince is giving the narrator a chance to view the stars in a way that no one else can: as a clue to how the prince is doing, somewhere up in the stars, and as a means of finding laughter.
Quote 12
“That man is the only one of them all whom I could have made my friend. But his planet is indeed too small. There is no room on it for two people…”
What the little prince did not dare confess was that he was sorry most of all to leave this planet, because it was blest every day with 1440 sunsets! (14.36-7)
Do you think the prince likes sunsets even more than he likes friends? Why or why not?