Caterpillars Quotes

We all travelled light, taking with us only what we considered to be the bare essentials of life. When we opened our luggage for Customs inspection, the contents of our bags were a fair indication of character and interests. Thus Margo's luggage contained a multitude of diaphanous garments, three books on slimming, and a regiment of small bottles each containing some elixir guaranteed to cure acne. Leslie's case held a couple of roll-top pullovers and a pair of trousers which were wrapped round two revolvers, an air-pistol, a book called Be Your Own Gunsmith, and a large bottle of oil that leaked. Larry was accompanied by two trunks of books and a brief-case containing his clothes. Mother's luggage was sensibly divided between clothes and various volumes on cooking and gardening. I travelled with only those items that I thought necessary to relieve the tedium of a long journey: four books on natural history, a butterfly net, a dog, and a jam-jar full of caterpillars all in imminent danger of turning into chrysalids. Thus, by our standards fully equipped, we left the clammy shores of England. ~ Gerald Durrell

We are like caterpillars, we die so we can be reborn in a higher state. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

I know that carrot is not the right word. I've
seen dragonflies and beetles, flying around, stuck together, one on the back of the other; I know it's
called mating. I know about ovipositors, for laying eggs, on leaves, on caterpillars, on the surface of the
water; they're right out on the page, clearly labeled, on the diagrams of insects my father corrects at
home. I know about queen ants, and about the female praying mantises eating the males. None of this is
much help. I think of Mr. and Mrs. Smeath, stark-naked, with Mr. Smeath stuck to the back of Mrs.
Smeath. Such an image, even without the addition of flight, will not do. ~ Margaret Atwood

Later, at the sink in our van, Mama rinsed the blue stain and the odd spiders, caterpillars, and stems from the bucket.
"Not what we usually start with, but we can go again tomorrow. And this will set up nicely in about six, eight jars."
The berries were beginning to simmer in the big pot on the back burner. Mama pushed her dark wooden spoon into the foaming berries and cicrcled the wall of the pot slowly.
I leaned my hot arms on the table and said, "Iphy better not go tomorrow. She got tired today." I was smelling the berries and Mamaa's sweat, and watching the flex of the blue veins behind her knees.
"Does them good. The twins always loved picking berries, even more than eating them. Though Elly likes her jam."
"Elly doesn't like anything anymore."
The knees stiffened and I looked up. The spoon was motionless. Mama stared at the pot.
"Mama, Elly isn't there anymore. Iphy's changed. Everything's changed. This whole berry business, cooking big meals that nobody comes for, birthday cakes for Arty. It's dumb, Mama. Stop pretending. There isn't any family anymore, Mama."
Then she cracked me with the big spoon. It smacked wet and hard across my ear, and the purple-black juice spayed across the table. She started at me, terrified, her mouth and eyes gaping with fear. I stared gaping at her. I broke and ran.
I went to the generator truck and climbed up to sit by Grandpa. That's the only time Mama ever hit me and I knew I deserve ~ Katherine Dunn

You are beautiful, but you are empty. One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you
the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars; because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or bloated, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

When someone comes to you with big dreams, don't be too quick to belittle their ambition and dreams. Inspire and help them in any way you can. Even the beautiful butterfly was once a caterpillar. ~ Rita Zahara

A man should not be a silkworm; nor a nation a tent of caterpillars. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

To crush fanaticism and to venerate the infinite, such is the law. Let us not confine ourselves to prostrating ourselves before the tree of creation, and to the contemplation of its branches full of stars. We have a duty to labor over the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd, to admit, as an inexplicable fact, only what is necessary, to purify belief, to remove superstitions from above religion; to clear God of caterpillars. ~ Victor Hugo

Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillars. ~ Peter Watts

Self-realization is a strange term. You don't actually realize your 'self'. If anything, you go away. The caterpillar enters the cocoon of meditation: A butterfly emerges - metamorphosis. ~ Frederick Lenz

Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is that we're brainwashing them from the cradle, and in the end even the ones who are smart will be too damned foolish. What do I mean? I mean the second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time they get to my classroom, to the third grad, they're well and truly gone -- they're full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits and they care how their hair looks! In the third grade. They care more about their hair or their shoes than about galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics. How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? Even worse on your tombstone than "dutiful daughter" is "looking good"; everyone used to know that. But we're lost in a world of appearances now. ~ Claire Messud

Adding wings to caterpillars does not create butterflies. It creates awkward and dysfunctional caterpillars. Butterflies are created through transformation. ~ Stephanie Pace Marshall

The time of dangling insects arrived. White houses with caterpillars dangling from the eaves. White stones in driveways. You can walk at night down the middle of the street and hear women talking on the telephone. Warmer weather produces voices in the dark. They are talking about their adolescent sons. How big, how fast. The sons are almost frightening. The quantities they eat. The way they loom in doorways. These are the days that are full of wormy bugs. They are in the grass, stuck to the siding, hanging in the hair, hanging from the trees and eaves, stuck to the window screens. The women talk long-distance to grandparents of growing boys. They share the Trimline phone, beamish old folks in hand-knit sweaters on fixed incomes.
What happens to them when the commercial ends? ~ Don DeLillo

The caterpillar turns to liquid before turning into a butterfly. Liquid. Thus washing away any speck of his caterpillar self as he lies completely vulnerable to his environment in his chrysalis shell. One good solid gust of wind and the caterpillars boned. ~ The Hippie

Hey. Hey, stop that, now. Uncle Drake is a nice man." He held Maggie, patting her while Jenny and Christian looked at their sister like she was crazy.
Drake looked like he was facing down the worst thug imaginable.
"We're a little sensitive."
"About cookies or cops?"
"Cookies. Spiders. Dogs. Cats. Birds. Balloons. Semi trucks. Caterpillars ... ~ Sean Michael

I am careful with the arguas (tomato caterpillars). Be careful with your mothers' hearts too, por favor.
THE PINATA-MAKER'S DAUGHTER ~ Eileen Granfors

I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. ~ Charles Darwin

Ugly caterpillars still turn into beautiful butterflies. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

The space that I can call mine.. is so small that my ideas have become small. I am like a caterpillar in a cocoon of paper; all around me are sketches for sculptures, small drawings that seem like moths fluttering against the windows, beating their wings to escape from this tiny space.. Every day the ideas come more reluctantly, as though they know I will starve them and stunt their growth. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Sir, this is a unique dog. He does not live by tooth or fang. He respects the right of cats to be cats although he doesn't admire them. He turns his steps rather than disturb an earnest caterpillar. His greatest fear is that someone will point out a rabbit and suggest that he chase it. This is a dog of peace and tranquility. ~ John Steinbeck

And if not the butterflies– and the caterpillars– who will call upon me? You will
be far away. . . as for the large animals– I am not at all afraid of any of them. I
have my claws.”
And, navely, she showed her four thorns. Then she added:
“Don’t linger like this. You have decided to go away. Now go!”
For she did not want him to see her crying. She was such a proud flower. . . ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

His mind took one of its odd jumps. He opened a clean page in his grimy notebook, and in the twig-divided shade of a wild cherry, infested with tent caterpillars, he began to make notes for a poem. ~ Saul Bellow

The caterpillars were a problem, however. Fat, fuzzy and complacent, they sat upon his vegetables in veritable hordes, ignoring him until he addressed one directly.

"Good morning, sir," he said.

The caterpillar paused the busy movement of its jaws to reply:
"Pleasant weather, this, eh?"

It was an ideal summer's day. The skies stretched out in endless blue overhead, unmarred by a single wisp of cloud; the fresh scent of greenery and earth rose into the nostrils, imparting a lively pleasure in being alive and outdoors.

"You seem troubled, sir, if you don't mind me saying so," said the caterpillar.

Zacharias experienced a brief internal struggle, but decided upon candour. ~ Zen Cho

Many caterpillars defend themselves not by striking fear in the hearts of their predators, but rather indifference. The large maple spanworm looks like a twig; the viceroy caterpillar looks like a bird dropping. This is not as exciting as looking like an anaconda, but when you are very small, and wingless, one of your main goals in life is to not be exciting. And speaking of unexciting - I think it is safe to say that woolly bears have one of the least advanced defense mechanisms among insects, although theirs is the reaction with which I most strongly identify: when distressed, the woolly bear rolls up into a ball. ~ Amy Leach

Dear Deborah,

Words do not come easily for so many men. We are taught to be strong, to provide, to put away our emotions. A father can work his way through his days and never see that his years are going by. If I could go back in time, I would say some things to that young father as he holds, somewhat uncertainly, his daughter for the very first time. These are the things I would say:

When you hear the first whimper in the night, go to the nursery leaving your wife sleeping. Rock in a chair, walk the floor, sing a lullaby so that she will know a man can be gentle.

When Mother is away for the evening, come home from work, do the babysitting. Learn to cook a hotdog or a pot of spaghetti, so that your daughter will know a man can serve another's needs.

When she performs in school plays or dances in recitals, arrive early, sit in the front seat, devote your full attention. Clap the loudest, so that she will know a man can have eyes only for her.

When she asks for a tree house, don't just build it, but build it with her. Sit high among the branches and talk about clouds, and caterpillars, and leaves. Ask her about her dreams and wait for her answers, so that she will know a man can listen.

When you pass by her door as she dresses for a date, tell her she is beautiful. Take her on a date yourself. Open doors, buy flowers, look her in the eye, so that she will know a man can respect her.

When she moves away ~ Lisa Wingate

The caterpillars legs, through perseverance, become wings. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Men are like caterpillars; their potential to soar lies not on the outside, but within. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

I'm sure I've been a toad, one time or another. With bats, weasels, worms ... I rejoice in the kinship. Even the caterpillar I can love, and the various vermin. ~ Theodore Roethke

Time can do all sorts of things. It's almost like a magician. It can turn autumn into spring and babies into children, seeds into flowers and tadpoles into frogs, caterpillars into cocoons, and cocoons into butterflies. And life into death. There's nothing that time can't do. Except run backwards. That's its trouble really, it can only go one way. ~ Alex Shearer

94 was a good year to be twelve. Star Wars still had two more years as Box Office King, cartoons were still hand-drawn, and the Disney "D" still looked like a backwards "G." Words like "Columbine," "Al Qaeda" and "Y2K" were not synonymous with "terror," and 9-1-1 was an emergency number instead of a date. At twelve years old, summer still mattered. Monarch caterpillars still crawled beneath every milkweed leaf. Dandelions (or "wishes" as Mara called them) were flowers instead of pests. And divorce was still considered a tragedy. Before Mara, carnivals didn't make me sick. ~ Jake Vander Ark

Like caterpillars our metamorphosis begins with what comes from our mouth. Caterpillars spin silk cocoons from the mouth. We speak life or death, success or failure. All transformation starts with what comes from our mouth. ~ Brandi L. Bates

Last night I fell asleep quickly, into a place beyond sleep, deep and silent, the place I imagine caterpillars go to turn into butterflies. ~ Sarah Willis

Ahead, a house sits close to the road: a small, single-story place painted mint green. Ivy grows up one corner and onto the roof, the green tendrils swaying like a girl's hair let loose from a braid. In front there's a full and busy vegetable garden, with plants jostling for real estate and bees making a steady, low, collective hum. It reminds me of the aunties' gardens, and my nonna's when I was a kid. Tomato plants twist gently skywards, their lazy stems tied to stakes. Leafy heads of herbs- dark parsley, fine-fuzzed purple sage, bright basil that the caterpillars love to punch holes in. Rows and rows of asparagus. Whoever lives here must work in the garden a lot. It's wild but abundant, and I know it takes a special vigilance to maintain a garden of this size.
The light wind lifts the hair from my neck and brings the smell of tomato stalks. The scent, green and full of promise, brings to mind a childhood memory- playing in Aunty Rosa's yard as Papa speaks with a cousin, someone from Italy. I am imagining families of fairies living in the berry bushes: making their clothes from spiderweb silk, flitting with wings that glimmer pink and green like dragonflies'. ~ Hannah Tunnicliffe

The Caterpillar cannot understand the butterfly ~ Timothy Leary

(There was an idea much beloved and written about by this country's philosophers that magic had to do with negotiating the balance between earth and air and water; which is to say that things with legs or wings were out of balance with their earth element by walking around on feet or, worse, flying above the earth in the thin substance of air, obviously entirely unsuitable for the support of solid flesh. The momentum all this inappropriate motion set up in their liquid element unbalanced them further. Spirit, in this system, was equated with the fourth element, fire. All this was generally felt to be a load of rubbish among the people who had to work in the ordinary world for a living, unlike philosophers living in academies. But it was true that a favourite magical trick at fetes was for theatrically-minded fairies to throw bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers in the air and turn them into things before they struck the ground, and that the trick worked better if the bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers were wet.)

Slower creatures were less susceptible to the whims of wild magic than faster creatures, and creatures that flew were the most susceptible of all. Every sparrow had a delicious memory of having once been a hawk, and while magic didn't take much interest in caterpillars, butterflies spent so much time being magicked that it was a rare event to see ordinary butterflies without at least an extra set of wings or a few extra frills and iridescences, or bodie ~ Robin McKinley

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, ~ Lewis Carroll

The caterpillar's end is the butterfly's beginning. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Writers have to keep on writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves. ~ Haruki Murakami

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly. ~ Andre Gide

Y'know scientists are funny. We probe and measure and dissect. Invent lights without heat, weigh a caterpillar's eyebrow. But whenit comes to really important things we're as stupid as the caveman ... Like love. Makes the world go 'round, but what do we know about it? Is it a fact? Is it chemistry? Electricity? ~ Martin Berkeley

Choice. It's the word that allows yes and the word that makes no possible. It's the word that puts the free in freedom and takes obligation out of the mix. It's the word upon which adventure, exhilaration, and authenticity depend. It's the word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar. ~ Tom Robbins

The wood lay still. The air throbbed with insects, and flies hovered and disappeared and hovered. Meadowsweet grew in a mist of flowers, and the sun glinted on the threads of caterpillars which hung from the trees as thick as rain. "By," said Gwyn, "there's axiomatic. ~ Alan Garner

Why is a caterpillar wrapped in silk while it changes into a butterfly? So the other caterpillars can't hear the screams. Change hurts ~ Rory Miller

How about when you feel as if you are at a treacherous crossing, facing an area of life that hasn't even been on the map until recently. Suddenly there it is, right in front of you.
And so the time and space in between while you first get over the shock of it, and you have to figure out WHAT must be done feels excruciating. It's a nightmare you can't awaken from.
You might remember this time as a kind of personal D-day, as in damage, devastation, destruction, damnation, desolation – maybe a difficult divorce, or even diagnosis of some formidable disease. These are the days of our lives that whole, beautiful chapters of life go up in flames. And all you can do is watch them burn. Until you feel as though you are left only with the ashes of it all. It is at this moment you long for the rescue and relief that only time can provide.
It is in this place, you must remember that in just 365 days – you're at least partially healed self will be vastly changed, likely for the better. Perhaps not too unlike a caterpillar's unimaginable metamorphosis.
Better. Stronger. Wiser. Tougher. Kinder. More fragile, more firm, all at the same time as more free. You will have gotten through the worst of it – somehow. And then it will all be different. Life will be different. You will be different. It might or might not ever make sense, but it will be more bearable than it seems when you are first thrown, with no warning, into the kilns of life with the heat stoked up – or when ~ Connie Kerbs

Many writers were picked on as children. Why? Because they were weird from the get-go. They were often to be found at the back of the class smelling erasers, or talking to caterpillars, or walking down the street with an encyclopedia balanced on their head. ~ Heather O'Neill

From rocks come gold.
From coal comes diamonds.
From oysters come pearls.
From caterpillars come butterflies.
From adversity come the great. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

I like - it's not that I want to be someone different from me, but I suppose it partly is that. I love creating a character in a fantastical situation, like Dr. Frankenstein, like Leo Bloom, a little caterpillar who blossoms into a butterfly. I love that. ~ Gene Wilder

All human beings have the ability to transform like a caterpillar emerging from its cocoon and taking to the sky. ~ Jim Rohn

It sounds good," he said. "It's the caterpillar's spats! ~ Leslie Charteris

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars. ~ Charles Darwin

We are the bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep, we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and springs of wildflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear. ~ Susan Griffin

Never step on caterpillars, as one day they'll become butterflies, and you'll never know when you'll need a ride on their wings of fortune. ~ R.P. Falconer

The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity. ~ George Carlin

It was an image Melody would never forget. Or was it the emotions the image conjured - hope, excitement, and fear of the unknown, all three tightly braided together, creating a fourth emotion that was impossible to define. She was getting a second chance at happiness and it tickled like swallowing fifty fuzzy caterpillars. ~ Lisi Harrison

Afraid? Me? A man who's licked his weight in wild caterpillars? ~ Groucho Marx

Once I spoke the language of the flowers,
Once I understood each word the caterpillar said,
Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,
And shared a conversation with the housefly
in my bed.
Once I heard and answered all the questions
of the crickets,
And joined the crying of each falling dying
flake of snow,
Once I spoke the language of the flowers ...
How did it go?
How did it go? ~ Shel Silverstein

When a caterpillar eats a leaf, then a thrush eats the caterpillar, or when a hawk eats the thrush only 5 to 20% of usable energy is transferred from one level to the next ... Thus herbivores will account for a much smaller fraction of the biomass [than plants] and the carnivores for a still smaller fraction. ~ Richard Heinberg

We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies. ~ John Marsden

Come back!" the Caterpillar called after her. "I've something important to say."
This sounded promising, certainly. Alice turned and came back again.
"Keep your temper," said the Caterpillar. ~ Lewis Carroll

When I think of mystery, I don't think about myself. I think of the universe, like why does the moon rise when the sun falls? Caterpillars turn into butterflies? I really haven't remained a recluse. ~ Bob Dylan

It's possible to make one's own grape pest disease culture by looking for sick or dead caterpillars. If sick, they will lose color and move slowly, if at all. At death, they often hang limp and darkened from a leaf by a spot of "glue." Several of these are all you need to treat an acre of vines. Whiz them in a blender with a quart of water, strain, and dilute to spray your vines. Use right away, as this mixture will start to putrefy after just twelve hours. It's a bit grisly, but very cheap and very effective. Just don't forget to clean the blender ~ Jeff Cox

A question arises regarding the angels who dwell with us, serve us and protect us, whether their joys are equal to those of the angels in heaven, or whether they are diminished by the fact that they protect and serve us. No, they are certainly not; for the work of the angels is the will of God, and the will of God is the work of the angels; their service to us does not hinder their joy nor their working. If God told an angel to go to a tree and pluck caterpillars off it, the angel would be quite ready to do so, and it would be his happiness, if it were the will of God. ~ Meister Eckhart

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

I'm a social caterpillar. I am not a social butterfly ~ Harry Turtledove

Although the butterfly and the caterpillar are completely different, they are one and the same. ~ Kendrick Lamar

Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

To explain the metamorphosis that takes place in the process of recovery from addiction, we have to wait for that physiological change to occur -you can't rush it, it will happen in its own time. Imagine trying to teach a caterpillar how to fly. The poor thing might listen, take flight lessons, watch butterflies darting around. But no matter how hard it tries, it won't fly. Maybe we get frustrated because we know this whole day has it in him to become a butterfly. So we give him books to read, try to counsel him, scold him, punish him, threaten him, maybe even toss him up in the air and watch his flap his little legs before crashing back to earth. The miracle takes time, we must be patient. But just as it is natural and normal for caterpillars to become butterflies, So can we expect addicted individuals, given the appropriate care and compassion, to be transformed in the recovery process. The metamorphosis is nothing short of miraculous, as people who are desperately sick are restored to health and a "normal" state of being. So don't sit around feeling sorry for yourself, be grateful that you have a disease from which you can make a full recovery. ~ Katherine Ketcham

The Dingy Playing Cards" by Robert Bly
Friends, it's time to give up our hope for Rapture. Saucers will not carry us away. Raskolnikov
Had to depend on the police to help him sleep.

Our soul loves the dingy cards that have been dealt
To the ne'er-do-wells. The old men put the old
Queens down with their smoke-stained fingers.

In the Cirque Du Soleil, when the acrobats
Sweep out over the crowd, babies are being
Born who know much more than we ever did.

The yellow teeth of old jackrabbits explains a lot
About the shortage of mercy; the caterpillar's walk
Reminds us of the Mongols galloping toward Khorakhan.

After the funeral, once they are safe, the dead begin
To miss losing at cards. We know that Cain and Abel
Want to meet each other again on the plowed field.

Robert, there's not a single humiliation we could
Have done without. We are still perched on a pole.
What will happen to us depends a lot on the wind. ~ Robert Bly

Look, I guess it's natural, you're teenagers, its springtime,everyone's thoughts are turning to birds and bees and caterpillars and moths ...
- Iggy ~ James Patterson

Luna moths have no mouths or stomachs. They do not eat, and only live about one week.
Where to Find It
As soon as the female comes out of the cocoon in April or June, she searches for a tree with leaves her offspring can eat. Many different trees could be food for her caterpillars. So you may find her on walnut, hickory, oak, birch, alder, sweet gum or persimmon trees. ~ Mel Boring

Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean "ecological" in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. ~ Neil Postman

Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

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

There's no great dividing line between being a kid and an adult. We're not all caterpillars turning into butterflies. You are what you are. When you grow up, you may be more careful than when you were a kid. You don't say what you think as much as you once did. You learn to play nice. But you're still the same person who did good things or rotten things when you were young. Whether you feel good about them or bad ... whether you regret them. Well, that's a different thing. But it's not like they disappear forever. ~ Matthew Dicks

If you see a bird "feeding" on a cattail spike, observe closely: Is it delving for caterpillars or their cocoons? Or is it depositing or retrieving a food cache? ~ John Eastman

One Sunday morning the warm sun came up and - pop! - out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar. ~ Eric Carle

Using time, pressure and patience, the universe gradually changes caterpillars into butterflies, sand into pearls, and coal into diamonds. You're being worked on too, so hang in there. Just because something isn't apparent right now, doesn't mean it isn't happening. It's not until the end do you realize, sometimes your biggest blessings were disguised by pain and suffering. They were not placed there to break you, but to make you. ~ John Geiger

But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice ... I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. ~ Charles Darwin

I am never at picnics. The ground was not meant to be sat upon in its raw state, I feel sure, and I prefer my food without either caterpillars or drafts! ~ Phyllis Bottome

Church members are either pillars or caterpillars. The pillars hold up the church, and the caterpillars just crawl in and out. ~ Grenville Kleiser

God changes caterpillars into butterflies, sand into pearls and coal into diamonds using time and pressure. He's working on you, too. ~ Rick Warren

We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation. ~ Terence McKenna

The fixed is the world without fire- dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark. It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread. ~ Annie Dillard

Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar. ~ Cornelia Funke

The summer of the gypsy moths when all the trees in their yard were bare, the leaves chewed by caterpillars. You could hear crunching in the night. You could see silvery cocoon webbing in porch rafter and strung across stop signs. ~ Alice Hoffman

The caterpillars of the commonwealth,
Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away. ~ William Shakespeare

Object Permanence"

We wake as if surprised the other is still there,
each petting the sheet to be sure.

How have we managed our way
to this bed - beholden to heat like dawn

indebted to light. Though we're not so self-
important as to think everything

has led to this, everything has led to this.
There's a name for the animal

love makes of us - named, I think,
like rain, for the sound it makes.

You are the animal after whom other animals
are named. Until there's none left to laugh,

days will start with the same startle
and end with caterpillars gorged on milkweed.

O, how we entertain the angels

with our brief animation. O,

how I'll miss you when we're dead. ~ Nicole Sealey

And if not for the caterpillars and butterflies, who will I talk to? You'll be far away. And as for larger creatures, I'm not afraid. I have my thorns ... to protect me. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars. ~ Christopher Marlowe

The thing about the old is that we never change so much as the young. We slip in degrees, adding rings like trees
a new wrinkle here, a shade less color there, but the young transform like caterpillars into butterflies. They become whole new people as if overnight. ~ Michael J. Sullivan

You had heard of a caterpillar that couldn't turn into a butterfly. And you would like to examine how it would feel to be denied such a beautiful thing. You would like to know how it feels for the caterpillar to watch other caterpillars transform while all the time knowing he would never have that opportunity. ~ Cecelia Ahern

That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts. ~ Herman Melville

True transformation occurs only when we can look at ourselves squarely and face our attachments and inner demons, free from the buzz of commercial distraction and false social realities. We have to retreat into our own cocoons and come face-to-face with who we are. We have to turn toward our own inner darkness. For only by abandoning its attachments and facing the darkness does the caterpillar's body begin to spread out and its light, beautiful wings begin to form. ~ Julia Hill

I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars - even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The ~ Henry David Thoreau

It is supposed that power corrupts,' the caterpillar said in a voice as untroubled as time itself. yet the powerful are often corrupt before they are powerful. In fact, I find that they too often become powerful by being corrupt. Whether real or perceived, a lack of power can also corrupt. ~ Frank Beddor