No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies Quotes

“But then again maybe a country that routinely prefers power over strength, and living over letting live, is no country for eight-spot butterflies.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“Part of our work as people who dare to believe we can save the world is to prepare our wills to withstand some losing, so that we may lose and still set out again.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“There have been periods in my own life when my grief felt more real to me than my hope, moments when my rage, sitting up, threatened to swallow my softness forever. It is here, in these moments, in these fields where older versions of myself come to die, that I am forced again to clarify what exactly it is that I believe.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“That when we are in pain, we inflict pain. That when we feel we can no longer breathe, we grab other peoples’ air.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“Because eyes wide with wonder is a perfectly good definition of magic. Because magic could just as easily mean stargazing, in the midday sun, while looking down. Because we had so little, yet somehow, we had it all.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“All of us—whether we choose to become human rights lawyers or corporate counsel, or choose never to practice law at all but instead become professors or entrepreneurs or disappear anonymous among the poor or stay at home and raise bright, delicious children—all of us, without exception, are qualified to participate in the rescue of the world.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“That the life of a healer was always hers to have because she was born breech under a new moon and thus had the hands for healing.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“talk about how reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist recalibrated my thinking about what it means to be a self-actualized adult—and what it takes to become one. In the speech, I tell the graduates that the only way to successfully make the journey (from adolescence to adulthood) is to learn how to “get quiet”—that is, to quiet down the noise of other people’s opinions and to take instruction instead from one’s own heart.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“We need not worry, our leaders tell us. We are a resilient people. We need only summon that strength now. Will someone please tell them that resilience is not a thing to be trotted out in trying times like a kind of prized pony? As the gifted Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat puts it, just because people are resilient doesn't mean they can suffer more than others.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“The house where words were shouted not spoken. The house that was never a home.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“The first thing I found was a family of tree snails, which I’d spend hours watching, wondering why they moved so slowly, wondering if they could, if they had to, move swiftly enough to save their own lives. I found so many things after that. I found I could slide down the smaller slopes at the back of my house if I had just the right piece of cardboard. I found out the hard way that before one runs through an open field of sword grass, one should wear a long-sleeved shirt. I found no need for a bike. I found butterflies in abundance. I found more grasshoppers than I could count. I studied them closely, that is, when they’d let me get close. I was awed by how far their little legs could take them. I couldn’t for the life of me fathom how such small legs could support such big hops. I wondered endlessly about wings. I was envious of everything that could fly. I prayed, without knowing how to, for wings of my own.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay