“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”

“Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.”

“How does one become a butterfly?" she asked."You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.”

“It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then to maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies. Maturation makes liars of us all.”

“Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.”

“Only the lower natures forget themselves and become something new. Thus the butterfly has entirely forgotten that it was a caterpillar, perhaps it may in turn so entirely forget it was a butterfly that is becomes a fish.”