Butterfly Quotes (page 2)
I sit beside the fire and think Of all that I have seen. Of meadow flowers and butterflies. In summers that have been. Of yellow leaves and gossamer. In autumns that there were. With morning mist and silver sun. And wind upon my hair. I sit beside the fire and think. Of how the world will be. When winter comes without a spring That I shall ever see. For still there are so many things. That I have never seen. In every wood in every spring. There is a different green. I sit beside the fire and...
J. R. R. Tolkien
The world was so beautiful when regarded like this, without searching, so simply, in such a childlike way. Moons and stas were beautiful, beautiful were bank and stream, forest and rocks, goat and gold-bug, flower and butterfly. So lovely, so delightful to go through the world this way, so like a child, awake, open to what is near, without distrust.
Herman Hesse
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent, because the mass man will mock it right away. I praise what is truly alive, what longs to be burned to death. In the calm water of the love-nights, where you were begotten, where you have begotten, a strange feeling comes over you, when you see the silent candle burning. Now you are no longer caughtin the obsession with darkness, and a desire for higher love-makingsweeps you upward. Distance does not make you falter. Now, arriving in magic, flying, and...
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students' hidden personal sorrows and joys. Like tearstains on a letter, these forays into the hidden and the personal shaded all our discussions of Nabokov. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer.
Azar Nafisi