Today. . . maybe I can take one step on that profoundly complex path to peace.
For our people, butterflies are a symbol of hope. It's said that if you capture one in your hands and whisper your dreams to it, it will carry them up to the heavens so that the wish can be granted.
The use of butterflies is to adorn the world and delight the eyes of men, to brighten the countryside, serving like so many golden spangles to decorate the fields.
They [the children] live in a world of delightful imagination; they pursue persons and objects that never existed; they make an Argosy laden with gold out of a floating butterfly,--and these stupid [grown-up people] try to translate these things into uninteresting facts.
Justin turned to give her one of his cool, unsmiling looks. Butterflies fluttered in her throat. She'd be very careful, Serena decided, as if she were walking through a minefield. "What are you thinking?" "About bombs," she answered blandly, "deadly camoflaged bombs. " She gave him a quick,innocent grin. "Are we going to eat soon? I'm starving.
You can be betrayed in your sleep. The whole world can tilt while you're dreaming of butterflies.
Melville had to fight, fight against the existing world, against his own very self. Only he would never quite put the knife in the heart of his paradisal ideal. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, love should be a fulfillment, and life should be a thing of bliss. That was his fixed ideal. Fata Morgana. That was the pin he tortured himself on, like a pinned-down butterfly.
Her sanity was a fragile thing, a butterfly cupped in her hands, that she carried with her everywhere, afraid of what would happen if she let it go-or got careless and crushed it.
So we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies.
The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.
The only time I had any butterflies was when I stood up and backed toward the open door and looked down.
No sun, no moon, no morn, no noon, No dawn, no dusk, no proper time of day,. . . . . . No road, no street, no t' other side the way,. . . . . . No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no buds.
Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education.
You've got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis.
Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.
Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious, it ceases to be of absorbing concern to scientists. Almost all the things scientists think and dream about are mysterious.
The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.
For me, my rule in this industry is I've got to listen to my butterflies. So if I got butterflies, then those are the scripts I go after.
Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly.
Adding wings to caterpillars does not create butterflies. It creates awkward and dysfunctional caterpillars. Butterflies are created through transformation.