Chrysalis Quotes

• Patience doesn't mean making a pact with the devil of denial, ignoring our emotions and aspirations. It means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process that's unfolding, rather than ripping open a budding flower or demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with.

  Sharon Salzberg

  Flower, Mean, Devil

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• The great loneliness- like the loneliness a caterpillar endures when she wraps herself in a silky shroud and begins the long transformation from chrysalis to butterfly. It seems we too must go through such a time, when life as we have known it is over- when being a caterpillar feels somehow false and yet we don’t know who we are supposed to become. All we know is that something bigger is calling us to change. And though we must make the journey alone, and even if suffering is our only companion, soon enough we will become a butterfly, soon enough we will taste the rapture of being alive.

  Elizabeth Lesser

  Life, Change, Loneliness

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• Is it sin, which makes the worm a chrysalis, and the chrysalis a butterfly, and the butterfly dust?

  Max Muller

  Butterfly, Dust, Sin

  Max Muller (1912). “Memories”

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• The word chrysalis alone is an unmistakable indication that here two dreams are joined together, dreams that be-speak both the repose and flight of being, evening's crystallization and wings that open to the light.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dream, Wings, Two

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• Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?

  Alfred de Vigny

  Eye, Wings, Degrees

  Alfred de Vigny (1923). “Cinq Mars”

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• There's a part of every living thing that wants to become itself: the tadpole into the frog, the chrysalis into the butterfly, a damaged human being into a whole one.That is spirituality.

  Ellen Bass

  Integrity, Butterfly, Growth

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• Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer casings, and - as the snake from its skin, the butterfly from its chrysalis - emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of consciousness.

  Annie Besant

  Butterfly, Men, Snakes

  Annie Besant (2016). “Death and After?”, p.15, BookRix

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• You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wisdom, Loneliness, Men

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.173, Courier Corporation

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• You are the nest. You are the hatchling. You are the chrysalis. You are the progeny. You are the rot that falls from stars. You may not understand what I mean. You will.

  Rick Yancey

  Stars, Fall, Mean

  Rick Yancey (2011). “The Isle of Blood”, p.253, Simon and Schuster

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• Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem for the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

  Pat Barker

  Butterfly, Cutting, Soul

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• With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.

  Edward Bellamy

  Summer, Eye, Dark

  Edward Bellamy (2000). “Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887”, p.187, Applewood Books

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• Like a butterfly stuck in a chrysalis, waiting for the perfect moment, I was waiting for the day I could burst forth and fly away and find my home.

  Emme

  Home, Butterfly, Perfect

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• The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.

  Marcel Proust

  Journey, Years, Ties

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.212, Modern Library

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• In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Nature, Writing, Butterfly

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.91, Canongate Books

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• A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.

  Susan Hill

  Book, Inanimate Objects, New Life

  Susan Hill (2010). “Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home”, p.2, Profile Books

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• Death is the opening of a more subtle life. In the flower, it sets free the perfume; in the chrysalis, the butterfly; in man, the soul.

  Juliette Adam

  Death, Flower, Butterfly

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• You go through your 20s sort of like a chrysalis in many ways, stretching into your own skin and trying to bust out of a cocoon.

  Jonathan Rhys Meyers

  Skins, Trying, Cocoons

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• We are gods in the chrysalis.

  Dale Carnegie

  Dale Carnegie (2016). “How to win friends & influence people”, p.67, Diamond Pocket Books Pvt Ltd

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• He raged for hours. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solelmn philosopher, hung quietly inside, saying not a word, suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.

  Ray Bradbury

  Skeletons, Waiting, Philosopher

  Ray Bradbury (1980). “The Stories of Ray Bradbury”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

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• Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.

  William James

  Wall, Cost, Alive

  William James (1977). “A Pluralistic Universe”, p.94, Harvard University Press

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• Every people, in order to remain healthy and strong, has to have a grasp of its foundation story. Culture is a chrysalis - it is protective, it takes care of you. That's what cultures are for. You cannot rob a people of language, culture, mother, father, the value of their labor - all of that - without doing vast damage to those people.

  Randall Robinson

  Mother, Strong, Father

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 26, 2005.

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• the cold winds of insecurity... hadn't shredded the dreamy chrysalis of his childhood. He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly's unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy.

  Harold Brodkey

  Spring, Butterfly, Wind

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• This is a woman [Hillary Clinton] who for many of her 52 years never cared a fig about her appearance, but in the chrysalis of transformation from political wife to independent woman, the jawline has been chiseled, the dominatrix eyebrows weeded, the weight dropped, and the result is a woman who obviously enjoys for the first time being called beautiful.

  Gail Sheehy

  Beautiful, Independent, Years

  Source: www.vanityfair.com

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• And besides, look at elder flowers and bluebells-they are a sign that pure creation takes place - even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Flower, Butterfly, Wings

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• It occurred to Dr. Lecter in the moment that with all his knowledge and intrusion, he could never entirely predict her, or own her at all. He could feed the caterpillar, he could whisper through the chrysalis; what hatched out followed its own nature and was beyond him. He wondered if she had the .45 on her leg beneath the gown. Clarice Starling smiled at him then, the cabochons caught the firelight and the monster was lost in self-congratulation at his own exquisite taste and cunning.

  Thomas Harris

  Congratulations, Self, Monsters

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