Spare Prince Harry Quotes

(The fonder the memory, the deeper the ache.)

What hell, being an adult!

It seems ironic that while they continue their pleas for privacy, Prince Harry ‘breaches’ Royal Family’s privacy in his Bombshell memoir. That can undermine his own future right to privacy.

I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they'd been there for me too. And I believe they'll look back one day and wish they had too.

Is each generation doomed to unwittingly repeat the sins of the last?

It wasn’t that she felt no emotions. On the contrary, I always thought that Granny experienced all the normal human emotions. She just knew better than the rest of us mortals how to control them.

He assured me that people do stupid things, say stupid things, but it doesn’t need to be their intrinsic nature. I was showing my true nature, he said, by seeking to atone. Seeking absolution.

She said: That was everything. She said: That is a man. My love. She said: That is not a Spare.

In this mixed-up world, this pain-filled life, we’d done it. we’d managed to find each other.

I heard the story of what Pa allegedly said to Mummy the day of my birth: Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an Heir and a Spare—my work is done. A joke. Presumably. On the other hand, minutes after delivering this bit of high comedy, Pa was said to have gone off to meet with his girlfriend. So. Many a true word spoken in jest.

The Heir and the Spare—there was no judgment about it, but also no ambiguity. I was the shadow, the support, the Plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy. I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow. This was all made explicitly clear to me from the start of life’s journey and regularly reinforced thereafter.

In some ways he was my mirror, in some ways he was my opposite. My beloved brother, my arch-nemesis, how had that happened?

Grief is a thing best shared.

I recall one headline, addressed pointedly at Granny: Show Us You Care. How rich, coming from the same fiends who “cared” so much about Mummy that they chased her into a tunnel from which she never emerged.

Maybe she was omnipresent for the very same reason that she was indescribable—because she was light, pure and radiant light, and how can you really describe light? Even Einstein struggled with that one.

not to be devastated by my mistake, but instead to be motivated. He spoke to me with the quality one often encounters in truly wise people—forgiveness.

Weddings were joyous occasions, sure, but they were also low-key funerals, because after saying their vows people tended to disappear.

Study, concentration, requires an alliance with the mind, and in my teen years I was waging all-out war with mine.

With bagpipes it’s not the tune, it’s the tone.

Being royal, it turned out, wasn’t all that far from being onstage. Acting was acting, no matter the context.

No one had an answer for a boy actually seeking external pain to match his internal.

He was, I realize now, one of the most truthful people I’ve ever known, and he knew a secret about truth that many people are unwilling to accept: it’s usually painful.

It occurred to me then that identity is a hierarchy. We are primarily one thing, and then we're primarily another, and then another, and so on, until death- in succession. Each new identity assumes the throne of Self, but takes us further from our original self, perhaps our core self- the child. Yes, evolution, maturation, the path towards wisdom, it's all natural and healthy, but there's a purity to childhood, which is diluted with each iteration.

I told them that I failed to see how speaking to Oprah was any different from what my family and their staff had done for decades – briefing the press on the sly, planting stories. And what about the endless books on which they’d co-operated, starting with Pa’s 1994 crypto-autobiography with Jonathan Dimbleby? Or Camilla’s collaborations with the editor Geordie Greig? The only difference was that Meg and I were upfront about it. We chose an interviewer who was above reproach, and we didn’t once hide behind phrases like “Palace sources”, we let people see the words coming out of our mouths.

He spoke to me with the quality one often encounters in truly wise people—forgiveness. He assured me that people do stupid things, say stupid things, but it doesn’t need to be their intrinsic nature.

Never complain, never explain.

It struck me at some point that the whole basis of education was memory. A list of names, a column of numbers, a mathematical formula, a beautiful poem—to learn it you had to upload it to the part of the brain that stored stuff, but that was the same part of my brain I was resisting. My memory had been spotty since Mummy disappeared, by design, and I didn’t want to fix it, because memory equaled grief. Not remembering was balm.

He didn’t seem sad, just ready. You have to know when it’s time to go, Harry.

Enough death - enough. When is someone in this family going to break free and live?

My family had declared me a nullity. The Spare. I didn’t complain about it, but I didn’t need to dwell on it either. Far better, in my mind, not to think about certain facts, such as the cardinal rule for royal travel: Pa and William could never be on the same flight together, because there must be no chance of the first and second in line to the throne being wiped out. But no one gave a damn whom I traveled with; the Spare could always be spared.

People warned me that the South Pole was even colder than the North. I laughed. How could that be possible? I’d already frozen my penis, mate—wasn’t that the very definition of worst-case scenario?

All my life I’d heard jokes about the links between royal misbehaviour and centuries of inbreeding, but it was then that I realized: Lack of genetic diversity was nothing compared to press gaslighting.

I remember the mounds of flowers all around us. I remember feeling unspeakable sorrow and yet being unfailingly polite. I remember old ladies saying: Oh, my, how polite, the poor boy! I remember muttering thanks, over and over, thank you for coming, thank you for saying that, thank you for camping out here for several days. I remember consoling several folks who were prostrate, overcome, as if they knew Mummy, but also thinking: You didn’t, though. You act as if you did…but you didn’t know her.

In a lifetime of existential crises, this was a bugger. Who are you when you can no longer be the thing you’ve always been, the thing you’ve trained to be?

How beautiful it all is, I thought. And also how sad.

I'd traveled the world from top to bottom, literally. I'd hopscotched the continents. I'd met hundreds of thousands of people, I'd crossed paths with a ludicrously large cross-section of the planet's seven billion residents. For thirty-two years I'd watched a conveyor-belt of faces pass by and only a handful ever made me look twice. This woman stopped the conveyer belt.

Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past. The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Maybe money sits at the heart of every controversy about monarchy. Britain has long had trouble making up its mind. Many support the Crown, but many also feel anxious about the cost. That anxiety is increased by the fact that the cost is unknowable. Depends on who’s crunching the numbers. Does the Crown cost taxpayers? Yes. Does it also pay a fortune into government coffers? Also yes. Does the Crown generate tourism income that benefits all? Of course. Does it also rest upon lands obtained and secured when the system was unjust and wealth was generated by exploited workers and thuggery, annexation and enslaved people? Can anyone deny it? According to the last study I saw, the monarchy costs the average taxpayer the price of a pint each year. In light of its many good works that seems a pretty sound investment. But no one wants to hear a prince argue for the existence of a monarchy, any more than they want to hear a prince argue against it. I leave cost-benefit analyses to others. My emotions are complicated on this subject, naturally, but my bottom-line position isn’t. I’ll forever support my Queen, my Commander in Chief, my Granny. Even after she’s gone. My problem has never been with the monarchy, nor the concept of monarchy. It’s been with the press and the sick relationship that’s evolved between it and the Palace. I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they’d both been there for me. And I believe they’ll look back one day and wish they had too.

Adults called it the nursery. Willy had the larger half, with a double bed, a good-sized basin, a cupboard with mirrored doors, a beautiful window looking down on the courtyard, the fountain, the bronze statue of a roe deer buck. My half of the room was far smaller, less luxurious. I never asked why. I didn’t care. But I also didn’t need to ask. Two years older than me, Willy was the Heir, whereas I was the Spare.

Also, the notorious Wallis Simpson. Also, her doubly notorious husband Edward, the former King and my great-great-uncle. After Edward gave up his throne for Wallis, after they fled Britain, both of them fretted about their ultimate return – both obsessed about being buried right here. The Queen, my grandmother, granted their plea. But she placed them at a distance from everyone else, beneath a stooped plane tree. One last finger wag, perhaps.

the twins from Alice in Wonderland.)

because Christie is famously stout.

The public was horrified. If journalists could use the mighty powers vested in them for evil, then democracy was in sorry shape.

Willy. Africa was his thing, he said.

The press had called me stupid for most of my life, and naughty, and racist, but if they dared to call me lazy…I

We’d not broken up. She’d given me a touching, tender farewell, and promised to wait for me.

fountain, the bronze statue of a roe deer buck. My half of the room was far smaller, less luxurious. I never asked why. I didn’t care. But I also didn’t need to ask.

I’ve never been more in love with you than in that moment.

Even for an occasional practitioner of magical thinking like me, however, some realities just can’t be changed.

that turning people into animals, into non-people, is the first step in mistreating them, in destroying them.

For the rest of my life, I knew, I’d be hearing some vestige of that sound; it would echo forever in some part of my being. I would also never forget, when the guns finally stopped, that immense silence.

Because if taken in excess, it causes giddiness, recklessness, and dangerous overconfidence,' said Slughorn. 'Too much of a good thing, you know . . . highly toxic in large quantities. But taken sparingly, and very occasionally . . .

As a confirmed bachelor I was an outsider, a nonperson within my own family. If I wanted that to change, I had to get hitched. That simple. All of which made my twenty-ninth birthday a complex milestone, and some days a complex migraine.

I’ll forever support my Queen, my Commander in Chief, my Granny. Even after she’s gone. My problem has never been with the monarchy, nor the concept of monarchy. It’s been with the press and the sick relationship that’s evolved between it and the Palace.

But another part of me felt hugely ambitious. People assumed that the Spare wouldn’t or shouldn’t have any ambition. People assumed that royals generally had no career desires or anxieties. You’re royal, everything’s done for you, why worry? But in fact I worried quite a lot about making my own way, finding my purpose in this world. I didn’t want to be one of those cocktail-slurping, eyeroll-causing sloths everyone avoided at family gatherings. There had been plenty of those in my family, going back centuries.

Later, after we’d brought her home, after we’d settled into all the new rhythms of a family of four, Meg and I were skin to skin and she said: I’ve never been more in love with you than in that moment. Really? Really. She jotted some thoughts in a kind of journal. Which she shared. I read them as a love poem. I read them as a testament, a renewal of our vows. I read them as a citation, a remembrance, a proclamation. I read them as a decree. She said: That was everything. She said: That is a man. My love. She said: That is not a Spare.

I never doubted how much it upset Pa that I was part of the Shakespeare-less hordes. And I tried to change. I opened Hamlet. Hmm: Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper…? I slammed it shut. No, thank you.

Besides, I wasn't crying because I believed my mother was in that hole. Or in that coffin. I promised myself I'd never believe that, no matter what anyone said. No, I was crying at the mere idea. It would just be so unbelievably tragic, I thought, if it was actually true.

I’d traveled the world, from top to bottom, literally. I’d hopscotched the continents. I’d met hundreds of thousands of people, I’d crossed paths with a ludicrously large cross-section of the planet’s seven billion residents. For thirty-two years I’d watched a conveyor-belt of faces pass by and only a handful ever made me look twice.

Icompleted my education at Eton in June 2003, thanks to hours of hard work and some extra tutoring arranged by Pa. No small feat for one so unscholarly, so limited, so distracted, and while I wasn’t proud of myself, exactly, because I didn’t know how to be proud of myself, I felt a distinct pause in my nonstop internal self-criticism.

And among the whole family. For months the Windsors had been at war. There had been strife in our ranks, off and on, going back centuries, but this was different. This was a full-scale public rupture, and it threatened to become irreparable. So, though I’d flown home specifically and solely for Grandpa’s funeral, while there I’d asked for

Yanks didn’t beat about the bush, didn’t fill the air with polite snorts and throat clearings before coming to the point. Whatever was on their mind, they’d spit it out, like a sneeze, and while that could be problematic at times, I usually found it preferable to the alternative: No one saying what they truly felt. No one wanting to hear how you felt.

And whenever I complained about it, privately or publicly, people just rolled their eyes. They said I was whingeing, said I only pretended to want privacy, said Meg was pretending as well. Oh, she’s getting chased, is she? Wah-wah, give us a break! She’ll be fine, she’s an actress, she’s used to paps, in fact, wants them. But no one wanted this. No one could ever get used to it. All those eye-rollers couldn’t take ten minutes of it.

Among all the different, riotous emotions coursing through my brother that afternoon, one really jumped out at me. He seemed aggrieved. He seemed put upon that I wasn’t meekly obeying him, that I was being so impertinent as to deny him, or defy him, to refute his knowledge, which came from his trusted aides. There was a script here and I had the audacity not to be following it. He was in full Heir mode, and couldn’t fathom why I wasn’t dutifully playing the role of the Spare.

I was also Widow Six Seven. I’d had plenty of nicknames in my life, but this was the first nickname that felt more like an alias. I could really and truly hide behind it. For the first time I was just a name, a random name, and a random number. No title. And no bodyguard. Is this what other people feel like every day? I savored the normality, wallowed in it, and also considered how far I’d journeyed to find it. Central Afghanistan, the dead of winter, the middle of the night, the midst of a war, while speaking to a man fifteen thousand feet above my head—how abnormal is your life if that’s the first place you ever feel normal?

Sadly, we were going to have to flee. We’d need to find somewhere new, and soon, and that would mean paying for our own security. I went back to my notebooks, started contacting security firms again. Meg and I sat down to work out exactly how much security we could afford, and how much house. Exactly then, while we were revising our budget, word came down: Pa was cutting me off. I recognized the absurdity, a man in his mid-thirties being financially cut off by his father. But Pa wasn’t merely my father, he was my boss, my banker, my comptroller, keeper of the purse strings throughout my adult life. Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable. I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf. I’d never asked to be financially dependent on Pa. I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the Underground. (Once, at Eton, on a theater trip.) Sponge, the papers called me. But there’s a big difference between being a sponge and being prohibited from learning independence. After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilized, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature? For not standing on my own two feet? The question of how to pay for a home and security kept Meg and me awake at nights. We could always spend some of my inheritance from Mummy, we said, but that felt like a last resort. We saw that money as belonging to Archie. And his sibling. It was then that we learned Meg was pregnant.

So, my number: Twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed. Naturally, I’d have preferred not to have that number on my military CV, on my mind, but by the same token I’d have preferred to live in a world in which there was no Taliban, a world without war. Even for an occasional practitioner of magical thinking like me, however, some realities just can’t be changed. While in the heat and fog of combat, I didn’t think of those twenty-five as people. You can’t kill people if you think of them as people. You can’t really harm people if you think of them as people. They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods. I’d been trained to “other-ize” them, trained well. On some level I recognized this learned detachment as problematic. But I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering. Another

The Sun ran a correction for their porn story. In a tiny box, on page two, where no one would see it. What did it matter? The damage had been done. Plus it cost Meg tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. I rang Pa yet again. Don’t read it, darling— I cut him off. I wasn’t about to hear that nonsense again. Also, I wasn’t a boy anymore. I tried a new argument. I reminded Pa that these were the same shoddy bastards who’d been portraying him as a clown all his life, ridiculing him for sounding the alarm about climate change. These were his tormentors, his bullies, and now they were tormenting and bullying his son and his son’s girlfriend—did that not inspire his outrage? Why have I got to beg you, Pa? Why is this not already a priority for you? Why is this not causing you anguish, keeping you up at night, that the press are treating Meg like this? You adore her, you told me so yourself. You bonded over your shared love of music, you think she’s funny and witty, and impeccably mannered, you told me—so why, Pa? Why? I couldn’t get a straight answer. The conversation went in circles and when we hung up I felt—abandoned.

The cultural code of the stiff upper lip is not for her boys. She is teaching them that it is not “sissy” to show their feelings to others. When she took Prince William to watch the German tennis star Steffi Graff win the women’s singles final at Wimbledon last year they left the royal box to go backstage and congratulate her on her victory. As Graff walked off court down the dimly lit corridor to the dressing room, royal mother and son thought Steffi looked so alone and vulnerable out of the spotlight. So first Diana, then William gave her a kiss and an affectionate hug. The way the Princess introduced her boys to her dying friend, Adrian Ward-Jackson, was a practical lesson in seeing the reality of life and death. When Diana told her eldest son that Adrian had died, his instinctive response revealed his maturity. “Now he’s out of pain at last and really happy.” At the same time the Princess is acutely aware of the added burdens of rearing two boys who are popularly known as “the heir and the spare.” Self-discipline is part of the training. Every night at six o’clock the boys sit down and write thank-you notes or letters to friends and family. It is a discipline which Diana’s father instilled in her, so much so that if she returns from a dinner party at midnight she will not sleep easily unless she has penned a letter of thanks. William and Harry, now ten and nearly eight respectively, are now aware of their destiny. On one occasion the boys were discussing their futures with Diana. “When I grow up I want to be a policeman and look after you mummy,” said William lovingly. Quick as a flash Harry replied, with a note of triumph in his voice, “Oh no you can’t, you’ve got to be king.

We’ll go down after Quidditch,’ Harry assured her. He, too, was missing Hagrid, although like Ron he thought that they were better off without Grawp in their lives. ‘But trials might take all morning, the number of people who have applied.’ He felt slightly nervous at confronting the first hurdle of his captaincy. ‘I dunno why the team’s this popular all of a sudden.’ ‘Oh, come on, Harry,’ said Hermione, suddenly impatient. ‘It’s not Quidditch that’s popular, it’s you! You’ve never been more interesting and, frankly, you’ve never been more fanciable.’ Ron gagged on a large piece of kipper. Hermione spared him one look of disdain before turning back to Harry.

The most recognizable woman on the planet,

This was a full-scale public rupture, and it threatened to become irreparable.

The way we simply fell into this synchronous alignment,

(As if my family had any control over these ghouls.)

A writer many Britons admired, a writer of thick historical novels that racked up literary prizes, had penned an essay about my family, in which she said we were simply … pandas. Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at?

he didn’t deal in bullshit. He didn’t give it, didn’t take it,

flâneur,

As the primacy of Self fades, they promised, the idea of Service takes over.

cadets who might want to text their girlfriends or boyfriends.

feeling, to know they’re over there, just on the other side, mere inches away—but the wall is always too high, too thick. Unscalable. Not unlike the turrets of Balmoral.

I didn’t know they had a mission, but one Spice compared the group’s crusade against sexism to Mandela’s struggle against apartheid.

After Edward gave up his throne for Wallis, after they fled Britain, both of them fretted about their ultimate return—both obsessed about being buried right here. The Queen, my grandmother, granted their plea. But she placed them at a distance from everyone else, beneath a stooped plane tree. One last finger wag, perhaps. One final exile, maybe. I wondered how Wallis and Edward felt now about all their fretting. Did any of it matter in the end?

Upon arriving we went straight into the school. Shepherd boys would come here twice a week, have a hot meal, go to a class. We sat in semi-darkness, beside a paraffin lamp, watching a lesson, and then we sat on the ground with a dozen boys, some as young as eight. We listened to them describe their daily trek to our school. It defied belief: after twelve hours of tending their cattle and sheep, they’d walk for two hours through mountain passes just to learn maths, reading, writing. Such was their hunger to learn. They braved sore feet, bitter cold – and far worse. They were so vulnerable on the road, so exposed to the elements, several had died from lightning strikes. Many had been attacked by stray dogs. They dropped their voices and told us that many had also been sexually abused by wanderers, rustlers, nomads and other boys. I felt ashamed to think of all my bitching about school. About anything.

As a royal you were always taught to maintain a buffer zone between you and the rest of Creation. Even working a crowd you always kept a discreet distance between Yourself and Them. Distance was right, distance was safe, distance was survival. Distance was an essential bit of being royal, no less than standing on the balcony, waving to the crowds outside Buckingham Palace, your family all around you.

I heard the story of what Pa allegedly said to Mummy the day of my birth: Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an Heir and a Spare—my work is done. A joke. Presumably. On the other hand, minutes after delivering this bit of high comedy, Pa was said to have gone off to meet with his girlfriend. So. Many a true word spoken in jest.

Mabel, our nanny, who’d once been Pa’s nanny, joined us.

He came back days later and said before doing anything I’d need to ask Granny’s permission. I asked him if that was a real rule, or the kind we could work around. Oh, no, it’s very real. It didn’t make sense. A grown man asking his grandmother for permission to marry? I couldn’t recall Willy asking before he proposed to Kate. Or my cousin Peter asking before he proposed to his wife, Autumn. But come to think of it I did remember Pa asking permission when he wanted to marry Camilla. The absurdity of a fifty-six-year-old man asking his mother’s permission had been lost on me at the time.

In fact we wanted to elope. Barefoot in Botswana, with maybe a friend officiating, that was our dream. But we were expected to share this moment with other people. It wasn’t up to us.

Isn’t “defending each other” the first rule of every family?

Saying Meg had gone into labour? I had a tiff with Sara about that. You know she’s not in labour any more, I said. She explained that the press must be given the dramatic, suspenseful story they demanded. But it’s not true, I said. Ah, truth didn’t matter. Keeping people tuned to the show, that was the thing.

I’d spent my life dealing with courtiers, scores of them, but now I dealt mostly with just three, all middle-aged white men who’d managed to consolidate power through a series of bold Machiavellian manoeuvres. They had normal names, exceedingly British names, but they sort more easily into zoological categories. The Bee. The Fly. And the Wasp.

My emotions are complicated on this subject, naturally, but my bottom-line position isn’t. I’ll forever support my Queen, my Commander in Chief, my Granny. Even after she’s gone. My problem has never been with the monarchy, or the concept of monarchy. It’s been with the press and the sick relationship that’s evolved between it and the Palace. I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they’d both been there for me. And I believe they’ll look back one day and wish they had too.

But I also didn’t need to ask. Two years older than me, Willy was the Heir, whereas I was the Spare.

Maybe if I get married, things will be different? They'd both mentioned pointedly, repeatedly, how much they liked Cressida.

My sense of guilt and shame made it hard at moments to draw a clean breath. Meanwhile, the papers back home had already begun skinning me alive. The Return of Hooray Harry. Prince Thicko strikes again. I thought of Cress reading the stories. I thought of my superiors in the army. Who would give me the heave-ho first?

the Palace was opting to play ball with her. They were going full Neville Chamberlain.

I felt nothing for her, except a bit of pity and a lot of jumpiness. She could kill a houseplant with one scowl.

He (William) said he thought Mummy was here. Meaning . . . among us. . . . Totally agree. I feel as though she helped me find Meg. Willy took a step back. He looked concerned. That seemed to be taking things a bit far. Well, now, Harold. I'm not sure about that. I wouldn't say THAT!

Teddy expressed eloquently, better than Pa ever could, the essential loneliness of his childhood.

Only the newest and stupidest boys would go to Pat with a problem. Or, worse, a cut. She wouldn’t bandage it: she’d poke it with a finger or squirt something into it that hurt twice as much. She wasn’t a sadist, she just seemed “empathy-challenged”. Odd, because she knew about suffering. Pat had many crosses to bear.