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# Weekend Words:  Butterfly
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-butterfly/
- Published: 2016-05-29T13:35:40.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:29:19.000Z
- Description: "I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days — three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain."
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:17 (2016, 2017, part 1)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/05/butterfly.jpg)

Adriaen Coorte, “Three Medlars with a Butterfly” (c.1705), oil on paper on panel, 27 x 20 cm, private collection (Image via Web Gallery of Art)

A just-published volume, [*Fine Lines*](http://www.artnews.com/2016/05/24/noble-winged-seraphs-nabokovs-butterfly-illustrations/?ref=hyperallergic.com), devoted to Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly drawings reveals the novelist’s detailed fascination with the male genitalia of the insect.

> Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.  
>  
> **—Muhammad Ali**  

> Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?  
> Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?  
>  
> **—Alexander Pope, “An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”**

> I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.  
>  
> **—Chuang Tzu**

> I still remember  
> How they found you, after a dream, in your thimble hat,  
> Studious as a butterfly in a parking lot.  
>  
> **—John Ashbery, “The Other Tradition”**

> The orchards are filled  
> With cherry blossoms at butterfly poise.  
>  
> **—Amy Lowell, “The Cremona Violin”**

> A power of Butterfly must be —  
> The Aptitude to fly  
> Meadows of Majesty concedes  
> And easy Sweeps of Sky —  
>  
> **—Emily Dickinson**

> And to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap-bubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.  
>  
> **—Friedrich Nietzsche, *Thus Spoke Zarathustra***

> This great purple butterfly,  
> In the prison of my hands,  
> Has a learning in his eye  
> Not a poor fool understands.  
>  
> **—William Butler Yeats, “Another Song of a Fool”**

> The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.  
>  
> **—George Carlin**

> I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days — three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.  
>  
> **—John Keats, letter to Franny Brawne**

> If you imagine, friend, that I do not have those  
> black serpents in the pit of my body,  
> that I am not crushed in fragments by the tough  
> butterfly wing  
> broken and crumpled like a black silk stocking,  
> if you imagine that my body is not  
> blackened burned wood,  
> then you imagine a false woman.  
>  
> **—Diane Wakoski, “This Beautiful Black Marriage”**