Butterfly Quotes - Page 9

• Except to heaven, she is nought; Except for angels, lone; Except to some wide-wandering bee, A flower superfluous blown; Except for winds, provincial; Except by butterflies, Unnoticed as a single dew That on the acre lies

  Howard Mumford Jones

  Lying, Flower, Angel

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• I saw this huge billboard that said: 'Abortion Hurts' and then it had a drawing of a butterfly. Who is that for? Is there a lady who's going to see that and be like, 'Oh, I was going to get an abortion but now that I realize it hurts I guess I'll just give birth to a child! 'Cause I know that's painless and raising it should be a snap!'

  Eugene Mirman

  Hurt, Children, Drawing

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• Butterflies may be better indicators of the health of our environment than birds.

  Roger Tory Peterson

  Health, Science, Bird

  George H. Harrison, Roger Tory Peterson (1976). “Roger Tory Peterson's Dozen Birding Hot Spots”, Simon & Schuster

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• I would have liked to catch hold of sleep at least once, just as I had been resolved to catch hold of death one day, to catch hold of the wings of the angel of sleep when it came for me, to grab it with two fingers like a butterfly after sneaking up on it from behind. [...] My sleep game was practice for the grand struggle with death.

  Danilo Kis

  Struggle, Sleep, Angel

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• When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.

  Roland Barthes

  Moving, Mean, Doe

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• I can't catch her by copying her, I can't draw her with a borrowed stencil. She is all the things a lover should be and quite a few a lover should not. Pin her down? She's not a butterfly. I'm not a wrestler. She's not a target. I'm not a gun. Tell you what she is? She's not Lot no. 27 and I'm not one to brag.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Gun, Copying, Target

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• 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.

  Edward Abbey

  Sports, Example, Boards

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.34, RosettaBooks

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• At first we raced through space, like shadows and light; her rants, my raves; her dark hair, my blonde; black dresses, white. She's a purple-black African-violet-dark butterfly and I a white moth. We were two wild ponies, Dawn and Midnight, the wind electrifying our manes and our hooves quaking the city; we were photo negatives of each other, together making the perfect image of a girl.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Girl, Dark, Light

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• In the next few galactic seconds, the fate of the universe will be decided. Life - the ultimate experiment - will either explode into space, and engulf the star-clouds in a fire storm of children, trees, and butterfly wings; or Life will fail, fizzle, and gutter out, leaving the universe shrouded forever in impenetrable blankness, devoid of hope.

  Marshall Savage

  Stars, Children, Philosophical

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• (Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn.

  Erich Maria Remarque

  Morning, Flower, Fall

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• Race is the great taboo in our society. We are afraid to talk about it. White folks fear their unspoken views will be deemed racist. People of color are filled with sorrow and rage at unrighted wrongs. Drowning in silence, we are brothers and sisters drowning each other. Once we decide to transform ourselves from fearful caterpillars into courageous butterflies, we will be able to bridge the racial gulf and move forward together towards a bright and colorful future.

  Eva Paterson

  Brother, Moving, Future

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• Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.

  Denise Levertov

  Touching, Paper, Dry

  Denise Levertov (1983). “Poems of Denise Levertov, 1960-1967”, p.143, New Directions Publishing

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• What makes a genius? The ability to see. To see what? The butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle in an egg, the saint in a selfish person, life in death, unity in separation, God in the human and human in God and suffering as the form in which the incomprehensibility of God himself appears.

  Brennan Manning

  Selfish, Eagles, Eggs

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• Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.

  George Sand

  Flower, Feelings, Sunny Day

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• The difference between me and a butterfly is that the butterfly looks at a flower with no purpose in mind but to sip nectar. The flower feeds its body while for me the colours and shapes and scents of flowers feed my heart. But how arrogant of me to assume that the butterfly does not feel its miniscule heart also soar for no reason other than touching and being touched by beauty!

  Densey Clyne

  Beauty, Flower, Heart

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• But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself.

  John Dewey

  Unique, Earthquakes, Forget

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, R. W. Sleeper (2008). “The Later Works, 1925-1953: 1939-1941”, p.112, SIU Press

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• My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Writing, Men, Hunting

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1973). “Strong opinions”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a cork board like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.

  Jerry Spinelli

  Flower, Mind, Owl

  Jerry Spinelli (2012). “The Stargirl Collection”, p.17, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• One thought spectra are marvellous, but it is not possible to make progress there. Just as if you have the wing of a butterfly then certainly it is very regular with the colors and so on, but nobody thought one could get the basis of biology from the coloring of the wing of a butterfly.

  Niels Bohr

  Science, Color, Wings

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• ...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

  Virginia Woolf

  Beautiful, Wings, Iron

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.367, Wordsworth Editions

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• A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.

  Tom Stoppard

  Dream, Two, Envy

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• You're beautiful, but you're empty...One couldn't die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass, since she's the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she's the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Beautiful, Thinking, Two

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• It seemed more and more like something out of a children's book - the butterfly that followed the little girl all the way home to her fifth-floor walk-up. How above-the-law children's books are. Hansel and Gretel (littering, breaking and entering), Rumpelstiltskin (forced labor), Snow White (conspiracy to commit murder), Rapunzel (breach of contract).

  Sloane Crosley

  Girl, Children, Book

  Sloane Crosley (2012). “I Was Told There'd Be Cake”, p.115, Portobello Books

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• She liked being reminded of butterflies. She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates of the butterflies in her yard after learning that they lived for only a few days. Her mother had comforted her and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, that just because their lives were short didn't mean they were tragic. Watching them flying in the warm sun among the daisies in their garden, her mother had said to her, see, they have a beautiful life. Alice liked remembering that.

  Lisa Genova

  Life, Beautiful, Mother

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• You can be betrayed in your sleep. The whole world can tilt while you're dreaming of butterflies.

  Alice Hoffman

  Dream, Sleep, Tilt

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