“My first thought was that a man who had come through a collision and rubbed shoulders with death merited more attention than I received.”

Sita Ram Goel, How I became a Hindu, Chapter 8

Ideas, p. 23
Catching the Big Fish (2006)
Context: An idea is a thought. It's a thought that holds more than you think it does when you receive it. But in that first moment there is a spark. In a comic strip, if someone gets an idea, a lightbulb goes on. It happens in an instant, just as in life.
It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments. That first fragment is like the Rosetta stone. It's the piece of the puzzle that indicates the rest. It's a hopeful puzzle piece.
In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawns, and the song — Bobby Vinton's version of "Blue Velvet". The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.
You fall in love with the first idea, that little tiny piece. And once you've got it, the rest will come in time.

Source: The Rise of the Hotel Dumort

Lews Therin Telamon
(15 October 1994)

Parallel Lives, Caesar

According to The Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/17/butterfly/, "the earliest instance of this saying was crafted by the enigmatic “L” for “The Daily Crescent” newspaper in New Orleans [in June 1848]. ... The linkage to Henry David Thoreau is unsupported."
Misattributed

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Source: Mortal Danger

Source: Vampires, Scones, and Edmund Herondale