The Old Butterfly Quotes & Sayings

My family didn't go to church. Once when I slept over at the house of a friend, her parents brought me to Sunday school with her. I was given this little pamphlet of tiny poems about the natural world, about butterflies and sunsets. My 7-year-old self was so astounded by how these few words were creating pictures and feelings in me. — Cheryl Strayed

This one isn't just any old horse. There's a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be? I tell you, my friend, there's divinity in a horse, and specially in a horse like this. God got it right the day he created them. And to find a horse like this in the middle of this filthy abomination of a war, is for me like finding a butterfly on a dung heap. We don't belong in the same universe as a creature like this. — Michael Morpurgo

Love, as is told by the seers of old,
Comes as a butterfly tipped with gold,
Flutters and flies in sunlit skies,
Weaving round hearts that were one time cold. — Algernon Charles Swinburne

Tatooine, huh? So awesome you know Star Wars facts," he adds nodding. "Do you ever watch the animated stuff?"
Grin. Grin. Grin.
I'm seriously at risk of an old-style faint. Holy-WTHECK? My neck and cheeks are volcano-hot. My entire chest swarms with an uncontrollable butterfly attack.
Butterfly riot.
Butterfly massacre.
Person slaughtered: Me.
Method used: Dimple.
The guy has a dimple. Of course he does. To match the Hollywood chin divot. To make the lump on my forehead pound even harder.
Points for Gray Porter: 3,000,000-bajallion, trillion to the millionth power. — Anne Eliot

My daughter, the Butterfly Girl, is 21 years old. She is not married. That third verse, in Butterfly Kisses, where I marry her off is only an "artists projection" to when she's 85 and out of the convent! — Bob Carlisle

No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out; And take upon's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by the moon. — William Shakespeare

I know the names of every intelligent being, the spots on the wings of every butterfly that broke out of a cocoon, the genetic codes of the simplest and most complex of creatures. I know how suns functioned, how worlds formed, how life evolved. All of the secrets of the old universes are mine. They can be yours too, if you want me to share, though I suspect you aren't bothered. — Darren Shan

Of one thing, though, she was sure: "I want to travel," she confessed.
Books were making her restless. She was beginning to read, faster, more, until she was inside the narrative and the narrative inside her, the pages going by so fast, her heart in her chest - she couldn't stop... And pictures of the chocolaty Amazon, of stark Patagonia in the National Geographics, a transparent butterfly snail in the sea, even of an old Japanese house slumbering in the snow... - She found they affected her so much she could often hardly read the accompanying words - the feeling they created was so exquisite, the desire so painful. — Kiran Desai

The old Chinese sage Chuang-tzu, for example, said: Once I dreamed I was a butterfly, and now I no longer know whether I am Chuang-tzu, who dreamed I was a butterfly, or whether I am a butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang-tzu. — Jostein Gaarder

Am I an old man who changed into a butterfly, or a butterfly who thinks he was once an old man? — Dennis Vickers

Beholding the flash drive that may contain so many keys, intuition dawns: I've always been a butterfly trapped in Donovan's net. My heart knows Donovan and I traveled together before, yet I've never allowed myself to think of the logistics. If the more I pull back, the more I crave his enclosure, what happens if I learn my deprivation has been for centuries, or even millenniums? Is being an old soul why I have always felt and sounded older than my years? Why do
I have the passions I do? How did I become me? — Diane Rinella

If we were walking here together, I'd point out the carnivorous plants that grow on this spot: sundews with sticky red leaves, eating insects to sustain them because the soil is so poor. If you were with me, I'd take you to the Doubler Stones, where thousands of years ago, Neolithic peoples carved channels in the rock to drain away the blood from their sacrifices. I would show you where the plover nests, and the green hairstreak butterfly lays its eggs. I love this place. I love this land. It's part of me, it's part of who I am. But it's no place for you: a seven-year-old girl in a princess costume. — Sanjida Kay

Next door I could hear the old man's soul flap its heavy vermillion butterfly wings as the hustler shot a load down his throat. — Tom Cardamone

It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe. — Neil Gaiman

Butterfly effect." "Right. It means small events can have large, whatchamadingit, ramifications. The idea is that if some guy kills a butterfly in China, maybe forty years later - or four hundred - there's an earthquake in Peru. That sound as crazy to you as it does to me?" It did, but I remembered a hoary old time-travel paradox and pulled it out. "Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?" He stared at me, baffled. "Why the fuck would you do that?" That was a good question, so I just told him to go on. — Stephen King

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. 'Ohe, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch.' At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. 'Hey, Spoono,' Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, 'Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. — Salman Rushdie

Dose who love deep never grow old ... Dey may die of age, but dey die young. — Arthur Wing Pinero