“I like terra firma; the more firma, the less terra.”
“The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.”
“Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
“Flying is hours and hours of boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of sheer terror.”
“Aviation is proof that given, the will, we have the capacity to achieve the impossible.”
“Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.”
“I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.”
“Women must pay for everything. They do get more glory than men for comparable feats, But, they also get more notoriety when they crash.”
“There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.”
“I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.”
“Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 second inform Press home Christmas.”
“Of all the inventions that have helped to unify China perhaps the airplane is the most outstanding. Its ability to annihilate distance has been in direct proportion to its achievements in assisting to annihilate suspicion and misunderstanding among provincial officials far removed from one another or from the officials at the seat of government.”
“A plane is a bad place for an all-out sleep, but a good place to begin rest and recovery from the trip to the faraway places you've been, a decompression chamber between Here and There. Though a plane is not the ideal place really to think, to reassess or reevaluate things, it is a great place to have the illusion of doing so, and often the illusion will suffice.”