Even now, I still believe metamorphosis is the greatest beauty.

Does the butterfly lose time in the months it grows from caterpillar to flying beauty? One day, I’m going to want to sleep twelve hours at a stretch and I won’t be able to. I’m not losing time. I am going through a metamorphosis.

Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts.

Sleep, she said. Sleep while you can. Forget where you are and forget the mountain of days. Each one enormous, lost in some forest that never ends, but then the edge will fold back and you'll walk on what was the sky and is now only another forest floor, another layer, and you can feel the weight of hundreds of these layers above you.

The caterpillar becomes a pupa to meditate and then becomes a butterfly

It is extraordinary that nobody nowadays under the stress of great troubles is turned into stone or a bird or a tree or some inanimate object; they used to undergo such metamorphoses in ancient times (or so they say), though whether that is myth or a true story I know not. Maybe it would be better to change one's nature into something that lacks all feeling, rather than be so sensitive to evil. Had that been possible, these calamities would in all probability have turned me to stone.