Air Flight Quotes & Sayings

I had a terrible premonition. His flight was to Miami. The old news footage flashed through my mind of Air Florida Flight 90 to Miami that went down in a freezing rain. It showed pieces of the wings and smashed fuselage floating in a huge hole in the ice next to the Fourteenth Street Bridge. A helicopter trying to lift a survivor from the black water. Rescuers watching helplessly from the shore. I tried to call him, but the network was down. I'd seen this fearsome power of the past before, how it can rise up without warning and strike the living with unerring timing. Later Lorenzo called from Miami and said it was a rough flight but they made it. I was happy that for once my intuition was wrong. — J. J. Jorgens

I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style; he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with here it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event.
- Innocence, from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead — Harold Brodkey

Even under more ingratiating conditions than rocket travel, this new conquest has already disclosed drawbacks quite as remarkable as its advantages. On a transcontinental flight by a jet plane approaching super-sonic speed, the actual trip is so cramped, so dull, so vacuous, that the only attraction the air lines dare to offer are those vulgar experiences one can have by walking to the nearest cabaret, restaurant, or cinema: liquor, food, motion pictures, luscious stewardesses. Only a lurking sense of fear and the possibility of a grisly death help restore the sense of reality. — Lewis Mumford

Each force in flight is balanced by an opposing force. The opposite of lift is weight. Weight is always trying to pull an object back to earth, so to get something to stay up, lift has to be greater than weight. You'd think your weight would always be the same, but it isn't. When you do aerobatics or go into a dive - like a kite that's plunging into the sand at the beach - there's an increase in gravity, and that makes you weigh more. If you want your heavy kite to stay in the air, you have to increase the lift, as well. Maybe by waiting for a stronger wind. Maybe by finding a windier place to fly your kite. Maddie brought lift back into my life by forcing me outside. So did Bob, who introduced me to the editors of this magazine. So did Fernande, the chambermaid at the Paris Ritz, who gave me her daughter's clothes and made me get dressed and brought me coffee every morning for three weeks. — Elizabeth Wein

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, is the most respected, and probably the largest, commercial flight-training school in the nation, I was informed. It's the Notre Dame of the air. — Frank W. Abagnale

Did you hear about this genius that got on a plane and set fire to his feet? Turns out he had bombs in his shoes and the problem all started when the flight attendants asked him nicely to extinguish his feet. He was wearing exploding sneakers. The new Nike Air-Jihads! — David Letterman

I'm a long-flight pilot. Pushing a little bubble of air-filled metal across an ocean of nothing is what I was born to do. — James S.A. Corey

Hillary Clinton flew with President Bush to New York City on Tuesday. She was amazed at the changes aboard Air Force One. For eight years she believed that flight attendants couldn't wear clothes because it made the plane too heavy. — Argus Hamilton

Before the sparrow arrived, you had almost stopped thinking about flight. Then, last winter, it soared through the sky and landed in front of you, or more precisely on the windowsill of the covered balcony adjoining your bedroom. You knew the grimy window panes were caked with dead ants and dust, and smelt as sour as the curtains. But the sparrow wasn't put off. It jumped inside the covered balcony and ruffled its feathers, releasing a sweet smell of tree bark into the air. Then it flew into your bedroom, landed on your chest and stayed there like a cold egg. — Ma Jian

Someone has to do it. It's all very well calling for eye of newt, but do you mean Common, Spotted or Great Crested? Which eye, anyway? Will tapioca do just as well? If we substitute egg white will the spell a) work b) fail or c) melt the bottom out of the cauldron? Goodie Whemper's curiosity about such things was huge and insatiable*.
* Nearly insatiable. It was probably satiated in her last flight to test whether a broomstick could survive having its bristles pulled out one by one in mid-air. According to the small black raven she had trained as a flight recorder, the answer was almost certainly no. — Terry Pratchett

Taking a trip with the Air Force Special Operations Wing folks is not like a flight on a normal airliner. For one thing, passengers and crew are all armed to the teeth. The seating is awful, the noise is incredible, and there is no movie. Your stewardess is likely to be a guy wearing a shoulder holster, and he will not bring you a pillow. — Frank Antenori

SKIRTING the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling, 5
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Till o'er the river pois'd, the twain yet one, a moment's lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing. — Walt Whitman

To test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved "slowly and insecurely" and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in which they swam was repeatedly floating up out of the jar and forming an "ovoid cupola." Who could eat? Von Beckh quickly moved on from turtles to Argentinean pilots. Under the section heading "Experiments with Human Subjects" - a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased - von Beckh reports on the efforts of the pilots to mark X's inside small boxes during regular and weightless flight. During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following year, von Beckh was recruited by the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force — Mary Roach

I leave no trace of wings in the air, but I am glad I have had my flight. — Rabindranath Tagore

Swelter's eyes meet those of his enemy, and never has there held between four globes of gristle so sinister a hell of hatred. Had the flesh, the fibres, and the bones of the chef and those of Mr Flay been conjured away and away down that dark corridor leaving only their four eyes suspended in mid-air outside the Earl's door, then, surely, they must have reddened to the hue of Mars, reddened and smouldered, and at last broken into flame, so intense was their hatred - broken into flame and circled about one another in ever-narrowing gyres and in swifter and yet swifter flight until, merged into one sizzling globe of ire they must surely have fled, the four in one, leaving a trail of blood behind them in the cold grey air of the corridor, until, screaming as they fly beneath innumerable arches and down the endless passageways of Gormenghast, they found their eyeless bodies once again, and reentrenched themselves in startled sockets. — Mervyn Peake

The whole procedure [of shooting rockets into space] ... presents difficulties of so fundamental a nature, that we are forced to dismiss the notion as essentially impracticable, in spite of the author's insistent appeal to put aside prejudice and to recollect the supposed impossibility of heavier-than-air flight before it was actually accomplished. An analogy such as this may be misleading, and we believe it to be so in this case. — Richard Van Der Riet Woolley

As the head of security for an airline, I can't ask my passengers to risk their lives and jump on a terrorist. This is why we need air marshals on every flight. — Isaac Yeffet

Something in the air this morning made me feel like flying ...
Spring Flight — Eileen Granfors

Socrates is flying. No, he is soaring. The wings behind him beat in a calming rhythm while the cool air rushes past. His wings are all that matter, snapping at the rushing wind like the sails of some great sea vessel, the feathery appendages all he is and all he will ever want to be.
His back muscles flex with the effort that takes him high above the ground. He feels the effort, of course, but sweeping into the sky does not require much of one. The sensation is pleasurable, even exhilarating. With flight there is freedom beyond description, an ecstasy bordering on sexual.
He has only one destination, and that is to soar higher, to no longer be a prisoner of the earth. Here destinations seem irrelevant, the world below small. Flying exceeds every pleasure he knows. In the immense forever of blue sky, all that matters is flight and his ability to climb higher.
Up and up and up... — Kenneth C. Goldman

Air France's in-flight magazine. — Ervin Laszlo

We are creatures of air, Our roots in dreams And clouds, reborn In flight. — Salman Rushdie

The sharp knife of dawn glitters in my hand but how bare is everything-tall tall tree infinite air, the unrelaxing tension of the world and only hope, hope only, the kind eagle soars and wheels in flight. — Martin Carter

How extraordinary it is to be here at all. Awareness of death can jolt us awake to the sensuality of existence. Breath is no longer a routine inhalation of air but a quivering intake of life. The eye is quickened to the play of light and shade and color, the ear to the intricate medley of sound. This is where the meditation leads. Stay with it; rest with it. Notice how distraction is a flight from this, an escape from awe to worry and plans. — Stephen Batchelor

The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who ... looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space ... on the infinite highway of the air. — Wilbur Wright

...this, he thinks, is the true curve of the world - now I glimpse it: all things are blended under the surface like the mass of us were blended in the water, it's the separateness of skin and rock and mind that is the great illusion. We are not discrete; we are not solid. People and things and even cities are meant to flow together, they are meant to connect, and this is why we're always full of longing, the way I long for the girl, and the girl longs for truth, and the truth longs for volume, and volume longs for people to hear it, and people long for - what? - for everything, air, home, violence, chaos, beauty, hope, flight, sight, each other. Always, whether to stroke or maim, each other, above all. — Carolina De Robertis

In October 1941, Mahilue became teh first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed. A German (Austrian) policeman wrote to his wife of his feelings and experiences shooting the city's Jews in the first days of the month. 'During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.'
pp. 205-206 — Timothy Snyder

When she spread her wings and leaped screeching into the air she had not the slightest doubt that every hand below her would stretch to catch her. And if one could leap from a height with no fear of falling, could one not be said to possess the secret of flight? Just like a bird, just like a god. — David Anthony Durham

I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens ... air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely. — Richard Nelson

PREPARE FOR LANDING PREPARE FOR LANDING, TRACK 1 The seat belt sign is illuminated The flight attendants beyond frustrated The passengers are drunk and frayed A baby's screaming in seat 16A Another flight from here to where? Crammed in a sardine can with not enough air We're on the map, I know that much But the directions I really need are in your touch Prepare for landing, says the captain As the plane arcs down to the looming horizon Ushering us onto some foreign soil I touch the ground, and see your smile Up and down, and down and up Cokespritebeerpretzelspeanuts As we careen through empty sky It feels like nothing but you and I Prepare for landing, says the captain Out the window, the sun is setting Hand in mine, you give a squeeze You're all the home I'll ever need — Gayle Forman

They open their wings, flash patterns and color, fly from flower toflower. I, with the dark brittles and many feet of the former form, inchalong the ground.
Sometimes all I want is two armfuls of air, a fistful of sky. — Nina Kiriki Hoffman

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. — Immanuel Kant

Upon the occasion of history's first manned flight - in the 1780's aboard the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloons - someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. "What use," he replied, "is a newborn baby? — Mary Roach

The Arrow and the Song
I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.
I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?
Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Forty years ago, Richard Branson, who ultimately founded Virgin Air, found himself in a similar situation in an airport in the Caribbean. They had just canceled his flight, the only flight that day. Instead of freaking out about how essential the flight was, how badly his day was ruined, how his entire career was now in jeopardy, the young Branson walked across the airport to the charter desk and inquired about the cost of chartering a flight out of Puerto Rico. Then he borrowed a portable blackboard and wrote, "Seats to Virgin Islands, $39." He went back to his gate, sold enough seats to his fellow passengers to completely cover his costs, and made it home on time. Not to mention planting the seeds for the airline he'd start decades later. Sounds like the kind of person you'd like to hire — Seth Godin

He didn't like to fly
the noise and vibration gave him a headache
but, as with anything new, he was excited by the strangeness of it. The disjuncture intrigued him: stepping through a door in one place, sitting still for a few hours, then stepping out a thousand miles away. It seemed to him a very American mode of travel, even more so than the car, not simply going farther faster, but eliminating any temporal experience of the journey, skipping over whole sections of the country, the sole focus on arriving, with the help of expensive and arcane technologies, at one's destination, except of course, when one didn't
a thought brought on by his own instinctive disbelief and the bumpiness of the flight. — Stewart O'Nan

What would air travel look like if airplanes were thrown out after each flight? No one would be flying in airplanes. — Gwynne Shotwell

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation. — Alfred North Whitehead

An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated
nearly
into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul. — Salman Rushdie

The music defied classification. If I had been writing a
review of the show, I would have labeled it progressive,
guitar-driven rock 'n' roll. But the guitars made sounds guitars
didn't always make. Symphonic sounds. Sacred sounds.
The music dug in so deep you didn't hear it so much as feel
it, reminding me of a dream I used to have when I was a kid,
where I would be standing on a street corner, I would jump
into the air, flap my arms, and soar up into the sky.
That's the only way I could describe the music.
It was the sonic equivalent of flight. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

Because we were stranded together and because I stuttered, we read. there is no refuge so private, no asylum more sane. There is no facility of voices captured elsewhere so entire and so marvellous. My tongue was lumpish and fixed, but in reading, silent reading, there was a release, a flight, a wheeling off into the blue spaces of exclamatory experience, diffuse and improbable, gloriously homeless. All that was solid melted into air, all that was air reshaped, and gained plausibility. (p. 43) — Gail Jones

While working with a camera crew supervising flight testing of advanced aircraft at Edward's Air Force Base, California, the camera crew filmed the landing of a strange disc object that flew in over their heads and landed on a dry lake nearby. A camera crewman approached the saucer, it rose up above the area and flew off at a speed faster than any known aircraft. — Gordon Cooper

The existence of birds demonstrated that heavier-than-air flight was physically possible and prompted efforts to build flying machines. Yet the first functioning airplanes did not flap their wings. The jury is out on whether machine intelligence will be like flight, which humans achieved through an artificial mechanism, or like combustion, which we initially mastered by copying naturally occurring fires. — Nick Bostrom

The plane that had taken off from Baltimore was caught in bad weather, which meant the Derridas missed their connection at Boston. Derrida found this delay and the whole chaotic journey a real trial. On the flight the following day, he spent the whole time tense and hunched up, clenching his fists tightly. And when Marguerite coaxed him to relax, he replied, furiously: 'Don't you realize that I'm keeping the plane in the air by the sole force of my will?' He was traumatized for a long time, and for several years he refused to get back into a plane. — Benoit Peeters

EVERY PILOT REMEMBERS his first flight. For me, it was in a Cessna 172 at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1968. — George W. Bush

Weightless (in air), alcohol units 8 (but in-flight so canceled out by altitude), cigarettes 0 (desperate: no-smoking seat), calories 1 million (entirely made up of things would never have dreamt of putting in self's mouth were they not on in-flight tray), farts from traveling companion 38 (so far), variations in fart aroma 0. — Helen Fielding

The worst thing that happened to air travel in the past ten years was the bankruptcy of Xhibit Corp., the parent company of SkyMall. I recalled with clarity the first time I boarded a flight and it was missing from all usual nooks and crannies. It had been a dark day. — L. H. Cosway

YOU don't know her secret," Win said to me. "Should I?" Win shrugged. "It's bad?" I asked. "Very," Win said. "Then maybe I don't want to know." Two days before I learned the secret she'd kept buried for a decade - the seemingly personal secret that would not only devastate the two of us but change the world forever - Terese Collins called me at five AM, pushing me from one quasi-erotic dream into another. She simply said, "Come to Paris." I had not heard her voice in, what, seven years maybe, and the line had static and she didn't bother with hello or any preamble. I stirred and said, "Terese? Where are you?" "In a cozy hotel on the Left Bank called d'Aubusson. You'll love it here. There's an Air France flight leaving tonight at seven." I — Harlan Coben

I hold that in the flight of the soaring birds (the vultures, the eagles, and other birds which fly without flapping) ascension is produced by the skillful use of the force of the wind, and the steering, in any direction, is the result of skillful manoeuvres; so that by a moderate wind a man can, with an aeroplane, un- provided with any motor whatever, rise up into the air and direct himself at will, even against the wind itself. — Louis Pierre Mouillard

Quantitatively speaking, 'conversation' is inversely proportional to economic standing. If you are traveling in a bus, your fellow passengers will get into a conversation with you very quickly and without any reservation. If you are traveling by first class on a train, people will be more reserved. If you are traveling by air, then the likely hood of getting into a conversation is quite small. If you are in first class on an international flight then you may travel 24 hours without exchanging a single word with the person sitting next to you. — Sudha Murty

The perils of aviation in the period are neatly encapsulated in the experience of Harold C. Brinsmead, the head of Australia's Civil Aviation Department in the first days of commercial aviation. In 1931, Brinsmead was on a flight to London, partly for business and partly to demonstrate the safety and reliability of modern air passenger services, when his plane crashed on takeoff in Indonesia. No one was seriously hurt, but the plane was a write-off. Not wanting to wait for a replacement aircraft to be flown in, Brinsmead boarded a flight with the new Dutch airline, KLM. That flight crashed while taking off in Bangkok. On this occasion, five people were killed and Brinsmead suffered serious injuries from which he never recovered. He died two years later. Meanwhile, the surviving passengers carried on to London in a replacement plane. That plane crashed on the return trip. Daly — Bill Bryson

A Thoroughbred racehorse is one of God's most impressive engines. Tipping the scales at up to 1,450 pounds, he can sustain speeds of forty miles per hour. Equipped with reflexes much faster than those of the most quick-wired man, he swoops over as much as twenty-eight feet of earth in a single stride, and corners on a dime. His body is a paradox of mass and lightness, crafted to slip through air with the ease of an arrow. His mind is impressed with a single command: run. He pursues speed with superlative courage, pushing beyond defeat, beyond exhaustion, sometimes beyond the structural limits of bone and sinew. In flight, he is nature's ultimate wedding of form and purpose. — Laura Hillenbrand

I was in the Air Force and was a boom operator (in-flight refueling). I got my comedy start in the Air Force. — Sinbad

I was on a 747 flight out of Denver with four flight attendants on the plane. One of the flight attendants got off the plane to go check someone's carry-on bag in the cargo hold, and while she was gone, the door closed and we began to taxi out. While we were giving the demo, we looked out the window of the airplane to see the flight attendant running alongside the plane in the snow, waving and yelling and trying to catch up to us. 'Did you notice that we're missing someone?' I said to the other flight attendant. 'Yes, but try to keep it low-key - there's a supervisor on board!' Well, it's hard to keep it low-key when someone is running alongside your plane, waving and screaming. The plane stopped and the air stairs went down so she could get on board, and my co-worker said, 'Tell her to try to be inconspicuous when she gets back on.' Well, she had to walk the entire length of the plane to get back to her station, and everybody on board broke into applause. — Betty N. Thesky

In the 1770s, when he was in Paris, Benjamin Franklin witnessed the flight of one of the first hot-air balloons. As the balloon soared into the air, someone asked Franklin: "What good is it?" Franklin responded: "What good is a new-born baby? — Benjamin Franklin

Glenn Hammond Curtiss was a bicycle enthusiast before he started building motorcycles. Although he only attended grammar school to the 8th grade, his interests motivated him to move on to greater things. In 1904, as a self-taught engineer, he began to manufacture engines for airships. During this time, Curtiss became known for having won a number of international air races and for making the first long-distance flight in the United States. On September 30, 1907, Curtiss was invited to join a non-profit pioneering research program named the "Aerial Experimental Association," founded under the leadership of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, to develop flying machines. The organization was established having a fixed time period, which ended in March of 1909. During this time, the members produced several different aircraft in a cooperative, rather than a competitive, spirit. — Hank Bracker

The powered flight took a total of about eight and a half minutes. It seemed to me it had gone by in a lash. We had gone from sitting still on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center to traveling at 17,500 miles an hour in that eight and a half minutes. It is still mind-boggling to me. I recall making some statement on the air-to-ground radio for the benefit of my fellow astronauts, who had also been in the program a long time, that it was well worth the wait. — Robert Crippen

Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible. — Simon Newcomb

You find what you love and you learn everything about it. You bet your life on what you know and run from safety, off your mountain into the air, trusting the Principle of Flight to bring you soaring up on lift you cannot see with your eyes. — Richard Bach

Bird taxonomy is a difficult field because of the severe anatomical constraints imposed by flight. There are only so many ways to design a bird capable, say, of catching insects in mid-air, with the result that birds of similar habitats tend to have very similar anatomies, whatever their ancestry. For example, American vultures look and behave much like Old World vultures, but biologists have come to realize that the former are related to storks, the latter to hawks, and that their resemblances result from their common lifestyle. — Jared Diamond

Spar felt a tiny thud on the back of his shin, as if a moth had butted against him on its flight through the night air. Wait, had that been the small human? Had she kicked him? He could not tell by glancing at her face. — Christine Warren

My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together - whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying. — James Baldwin

This was one of those perfect New England days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders. — Sarah Orne Jewett

The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding. — Immanuel Kant

The means of choice:
She might choose to ascend
The falling dream,
By some angelic power without a name
Reverse the motion, plunge into upwardness,
Know height without an end,
Density melt to air, silence yield a voice
Within her fall she felt the pull of Grace. — May Sarton

A sudden dart when a little over a hundred feet from the end of the track, or a little over 120 feet from the point at which it rose into the air, ended the flight. — Orville Wright

At thirty-three the Whammer still enjoyed exceptional eyesight. He saw the ball spin off Roy's fingertips and it reminded him of a white pigeon he had kept as a boy, that he would send into flight by flipping it into the air. The ball flew at him and he was conscious of its bird-form and white flapping wings, until it suddenly disappeared from view. He heard a noise like the bang of a firecracker at his feet and Sam had the ball in his mitt. Unable to believe his ears he heard Mercy intone a reluctant strike. — Bernard Malamud

Of all animal movements, flight is indisputably the finest. . . . The fact that a creature as heavy, bulk for bulk, as many solid substances, can by the unaided movements of its wings urge itself through the air with a speed little short of a cannonball, fills the mind with wonder. — David McCullough

I think, just the exhilaration of flying. The freedom of the air. The freedom of flight. And you completely remove yourself from the world. And you can voluntarily remove yourself from all those ... everything that's near and dear to you. And you voluntarily return. — Nancy Bird Walton

What had transpired that day in 1903, in the stiff winds and cold of the Outer Banks in less than two hours time, was one of the turning points in history, the beginning of change for the world far greater than any of those present could possibly have imagined. With their homemade machine, Wilbur and Orville Wright had shown without a doubt that man could fly and if the world did not yet know it, they did. Their flights that morning were the first ever in which a piloted machine took off under its own power into the air in full flight, sailed forward with no loss of speed, and landed at a point as high as that from which it started. — David McCullough

The course of the flight up and down was exceedingly erratic, partly due to the irregularity of the air, and partly to lack of experience in handling this machine. The control of the front rudder was difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center. — Orville Wright

The guy said industry slang for flight attendant was Space Waitress. Or Air Mattress. — Chuck Palahniuk

Bellow

"Tell the range and all that's howling,
the flickers of life beyond the weeds,
the vulture's furrowed brow of flight,
the blasted sticky Canadian lawn thistle;
tell the clowned-out clouds and the rain,
and all that makes you go quiet again,
tell them that you didn't come here
to make a fuss, or break, or growl, or
scream; tell them-crazy sky and stars
between-tell them you didn't come
to disturb the night air and throw a fit,
then get down in the dark and do it. — Ada Limon

Dandelion seeds were scattered across the glass, and as a light breeze blew, the fluffy ends were caught in the moving air and danced delicately off my windshield as they took flight, moving away from me, in the direction the man had gone. — Mia Sheridan

I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going. And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and alas begin our flight. And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going to. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you're going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you. — C. JoyBell C.

NOT THEY WHO SOAR Not they who soar, but they who plod Their rugged way, unhelped, to God Are heroes; they who higher fare, And, flying, fan the upper air, Miss all the toil that hugs the sod. 'Tis they whose backs have felt the rod, Whose feet have pressed the path unshod, May smile upon defeated care, Not they who soar. High up there are no thorns to prod, Nor boulders lurking 'neath the clod To turn the keenness of the share, For flight is ever free and rare; But heroes they the soil who 've trod, Not they who soar! — Paul Laurence Dunbar

He's throwing everything he can into the air on the chance that something might take flight. And we're the smallest, weakest bird. — Ally Condie

He'd watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air. — Cormac McCarthy

I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that has seams tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies. But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks. The drinks, people. — Jim Butcher

I tutored myself in the art of solemnity, kept my euphoria private, and adopted a serious demeanour in keeping with everyone else and the general ambience of the house. I continued my solitary daily walks about the estate, carefully choreographing scenes and conversations yet to happen. I returned to those places of our clandestine moments together, replaying them in my head, languishing in his treasured words . . . and sometimes adding more. I stood under frosty sunsets, my warm breath mingling with the cold evening air as I watched the silent flight of birds across the sky. And even in those twilit autumnal days I felt a light shine down upon my path. For though he was no longer at Deyning, no longer in England, the fact that he lived and breathed had already altered my vision; and nothing, not even a war, could quell my faith in the inevitability of his presence in my life. — Judith Kinghorn

One of the things that we can say with confidence is that we will have much lighter, much stronger materials, and this will reduce the cost of air flight, and the cost of rockets. — Ralph Merkle

Airline food is not intended for human consumption. It's intended as a form of in-flight entertainment, wherein the object is to guess what it is, starting with broad categories such as "mineral" and "linoleum." — Dave Barry

One can get a proper insight into the practice of flying only by actual flying experiments ... The manner in which we have to meet the irregularities of the wind, when soaring in the air, can only be learnt by being in the air itself ... The only way which leads us to a quick development in human flight is a systematic and energetic practice in actual flying experiments. — Otto Lilienthal

I made a date with her for the following week. Mid-week, I went for a ride in a T-28. The engine failed, the pilot slid the plane into the sand of the Mojave out near El Centro, and I slid into a hospital bed for about ten days at North Island Naval Air Station. While I was in the hospital, the CARDIV left for WestPac. I called Marguerite and told her what happened and that I wanted to see her again. I'm not sure she believed me, but agreed to another date. Unfortunately it had to be a short date because I had to head for Norton Air Force base to catch a flight for Hawaii, to meet up with the CARDIV. — W.R. Spicer

We, helpless infants in arms or creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our dreams of air flight. Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears of dim and monstrous things. We newborn infants, without experience, were born with fear, with memory of fear; and memory is experience. — Jack London

It doesn't matter to me what he feels if I can't live with what he does.
Lilley, R.K. (2012-10-20). In Flight (Up in the Air Book 1) (Kindle Locations 4662-4663). R.K. Lilley. Kindle Edition. — R.K. Lilley

Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls. — Don DeLillo

Stephan always looked like a model, but he never needed more than ten minutes to get ready. I found it both convenient and infuriating, depending on the time of the month.
Lilley, R.K. (2012-10-20). In Flight (Up in the Air Book 1) (Kindle Locations 2695-2696). R.K. Lilley. Kindle Edition. — R.K. Lilley

The federal air marshal, the passengers, the flight crew, and the pilots are truly the last line of defense. American public spaces and schools need the same approach. Let's cut the feel-good politics and recognize that by the time someone with dangerous plans reaches your doorstep, it's too late to ponder root causes of antisocial behavior - it's time to act! All of the thinking should have been done beforehand. And the level of commitment to stop grotesque violence in its tracks - stone cold dead - has to exceed theirs if protecting the principal is going to succeed. — Gary J. Byrne

Sun drifts, moon breaches, cool air whispers into the night. Tears fall, arms comfort, birds in the distance take flight. Waning crescent, smother my cries, take me up to the inky skies." She — Melissa Foster

On December 17, 1903, on a windy North Carolina beach for just shy of one hundred seconds, the Wright brothers demonstrated that a heavier-than-air, self-propelled vehicle could fly. The moment was electric and its importance widely understood. Almost immediately, there was an explosion of interest in this newfound technology of manned flight, and a gaggle of innovators began to build upon it. — Lawrence Lessig

I swam across the rocks and compared myself favorably with the sars. To swim fishlike, horizontally, was the logical method in a medium eight hundred times denser than air. To halt and hang attached to nothing, no lines or air pipe to the surface, was a dream. At night I had often had visions of flying by extending my arms as wings. Now I flew without wings. (Since that first aqualung flight, I have never had a dream of flying.) — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time ... the jumbo jet Bostan, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above — Salman Rushdie

I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it's the body's reaching, bringing air to itself. I tell them that it's the heart's triumph, the victory speech of the feet, the refinement of animal lunge and flight, the purest metaphor of tribe and self. It's life flipping death the bird. I make this stuff up. — Lorrie Moore

I'm very comfortable in the air. And if you're really in love with flight, you're in love to a certain extent with being outside of the body, not grounded. The problem is, if you're not in your body, you can't actually feel anything particularly authentically. — Ellen McLaughlin

Awestruck, Flora stared at the dishevelled sisters with their blazing faces and radiant ragged wings, who smelled of no kin but the wild high air. — Laline Paull

The reason why people wear pajamas to the airport in the first place is so that they'll be comfortable during their flight. But you know, typically, air travel is 50 to 75 percent of the time you spend traveling. The rest of the time you spend in public places like airports and around other people. That's when looking good trumps comfort. — Casey Neistat

I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around-the-world Voyager. — Burt Rutan

The air is an extremely dangerous, jealous and exacting mistress. Once under the spell most lovers are faithful to the end, which is not always old age. Even those masters and princes of aerial fighting, the survivors of fifty mortal duels in the high air who have come scatheless through the War and all its perils, have returned again and again to their love and perished too often in some ordinary commonplace flight undertaken for pure amusement. — Winston Churchill

Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda.
The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis. — Thomas Merton

Books are meat and medicine
and flame and flight and flower
steel, stitch, cloud and clout,
and drumbeats on the air. — Gwendolyn Brooks