Acknowledgements, p. 549
Source: His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000)
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Do you have more details about the quote "Read like a butterfly, write like a bee." by Philip Pullman?
Philip Pullman 161
English author 1946Related quotes
“I float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. There's nobody as beautiful or as powerful as me!”
Billy Graham (wrestler)
(1943–2023) American professional wrestler, american football player, bodybuilder
Billy Graham, Tangled Ropes: Superstar Billy Graham (2006)
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hands can't hit what the eyes can't see.”
Muhammad Ali
(1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist
Variant: Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
Source: Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times
George MacDonald
(1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist
The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: A fairytale, like a butterfly or a bee, helps itself on all sides, sips at every wholesome flower, and spoils not one. The true fairytale is, to my mind, very like the sonata. We all know that a sonata means something; and where there is the faculty of talking with suitable vagueness, and choosing metaphor sufficiently loose, mind may approach mind, in the interpretation of a sonata, with the result of a more or less contenting consciousness of sympathy. But if two or three men sat down to write each what the sonata meant to him, what approximation to definite idea would be the result? Little enough — and that little more than needful. We should find it had roused related, if not identical, feelings, but probably not one common thought. Has the sonata therefore failed? Had it undertaken to convey, or ought it to be expected to impart anything defined, anything notionally recognizable?
"But words are not music; words at least are meant and fitted to carry a precise meaning!"
It is very seldom indeed that they carry the exact meaning of any user of them! And if they can be so used as to convey definite meaning, it does not follow that they ought never to carry anything else. Words are like things that may be variously employed to various ends. They can convey a scientific fact, or throw a shadow of her child's dream on the heart of a mother. They are things to put together like the pieces of a dissected map, or to arrange like the notes on a stave.
“He was able to read and write like a well bred man.”
Dominicus Corea
(1565–1596) King of Kotte and Sitawaka
De Queyroz, the great Portuguese historian writing about Dominicus Corea - The Conquest of Ceylon (Volumes 1-6) By Fr. Fernao de Queyroz, tr. Fr. S. G. Perera, Ceylon Government Press, (1930)
