Quotes & Sayings About Long Flights

I spent my entire childhood living abroad because of my father's occupation, so we were on long-haul flights all the time. — Arabella Weir

Like all professional sailors, Holden had sometimes ended long flights by drinking himself into a stupor. More than once he'd wandered into a brothel and left only when they threw him out with an emptied account, a sore groin, and a prostate as dry as the Sahara desert. So when Amos staggered into his room after three days on station, Holden knew exactly what the big mechanic felt like. — James S.A. Corey

unaccustomed Tuscan sunlight, and his body ached from contorting his long frame into a plane seat. The irony of hating long distance flights wasn't lost on him. After all, he spent most of his life jetting between hotels. But he wasn't — Sally Clements

I love long flights. The feeling of being completely unreachable is something I savor, and the limbolike state of being, having departed but not arrived, somehow allows me to catch up with myself, to regroup and check in. — Alan Cumming

If you have to travel," Coulter said, "I can't think of a better way than the Translocator." "I know, I'm getting spoiled," Warren replied. "I'm not sure I'll be able to do airports ever again." Tanu nodded. "No customs, no checked bags, no tiny seats for ten hours at a time." "What are you griping about?" Warren said. "You hibernate like a grizzly on those long flights." "I sleep to escape the torture," Tanu maintained. — Brandon Mull

I have never dreamed of being a princess. I have not longed for Prince Charming. I have and do long for something resembling a happily ever after. I am supposed to be above such flights of fantasy, but I am not. I am enamored of fairy tales. — Roxane Gay

Domestic airplanes are basically designed to keep people seated, settled, and sedated for the duration of flight. If they could, they would install catheters in the seats and strap the people down from takeoff until landing. International flights are a little different, due to the part where sometimes people's veins explode if they sit still in a pressurized cabin for too long. (This may be a small exaggeration - emphasis on "small," not "exaggeration." Deep vein thrombosis is the silent killer of the long-haul flight.) To combat this, international carriers often encourage people to get up, move around, and keep their blood circulating normally. Sure, it means the aisles get a little crowded from time to time, and it makes the TSA nervous, but better that than a bunch of dead passengers. — Seanan McGuire

The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor greyhound, who was named Lancer, in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights of stairs above the street level. His entire life was devoted to unloading his excrement at the proper time and place. There were two proper places to put it: in the gutter outside the door seventy-two steps below, with the traffic whizzing by, or in a roasting pan, his mistress kept in front of the Westinghouse refrigerator.
Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time, just as Wayne Hoobler did, that some kind of terrible mistake had been made. — Kurt Vonnegut

The Luidaeg sighed and put her arms around me, pulling me close. "Come here," she said. "I need to hold someone, and you need to be held. It's a fair trade. Just for a little while, and then we can go on being what we are." I thought about objecting, but dismissed the idea and nestled against her, enjoying the feeling of security given by knowing someone bigger and stronger than I was would stop anything from hurting me. That's all childhood is, after all: strong arms to hold back the dark, a story to keep the shadows dancing, and a candle to mark the long journey into day. A song to keep the flights of angels at bay. How many miles to Babylon? Sorry. I don't care. — Seanan McGuire

I was motivated to improve the U.S. strategy of going back to the moon in 1985. That's a long time ago. Going back to the moon would be a great achievement for tourism adventure flights. — Buzz Aldrin

All of the third-world flights docked here, families waiting days for their connections, squatting on the floor in big bacterial clumps, and it was a long trek to where the European-North American travelers came and went, making those brisk, no-nonsense flights with extra leg-room and private TV, whizzing over for a single meeting in such a manner that it was truly hard to imagine they were shitting-peeing, bleeding-weeping humans at all. Silk and cashmere, bleached teeth, Prozac, laptops, and a sandwich for their lunch named the Milano. — Kiran Desai

Voices tossed up and down the long flights of stairs, sourceless and intertwining like crickets' chorus, gentle as fingers on my hair. Night, they said, good night, sleep well. Welcome back, Lexie. Yes, welcome back. Good night. Sweet dreams. — Tana French

As I approach my 88th birthday, it's become apparent to me that my eyes and ears, among other appurtenances, aren't quite what they used to be. The prospect of long flights to wherever in search of whatever are not quite as appealing. — Mike Wallace

We need to figure out how to launch multiple times a day," Musk said. "The thing that's important in the long run is establishing a self-sustaining base on Mars. In order for that to work - in order to have a self-sustaining city on Mars - there would need to be millions of tons of equipment and probably millions of people. So how many launches is that? Well, if you send up 100 people at a time, which is a lot to go on such a long journey, you'd need to do 10,000 flights to get to a million people. So 10,000 flights over what period of time? Given that you can only really depart for Mars once every two years, that means you would need like forty or fifty years. — Ashlee Vance

The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come. — Herman Melville

But anyway, I was convinced that it would go away, you know. But the idea was that he was sitting on a flight - you know, one of those sort of fairly long flights, like, sort of, you know, Newark to Denver or something like that - so, you know, a few hours. — Nick Lowe

Long flights give you more time to reflect, look around, experience your surroundings. I got to know the nooks and crannies on Mir very, very well. — Michael Foale

On long haul flights I always drink loads and loads of water and eat light and healthy food. — Lisa Snowdon

Louie killed time by sleeping on Mitchell's navigator table and taking flying lessons from Phil. On some flights, he sprawled behind the cockpit, reading Ellery Queen novels and taxing the nerves of Douglas, who eventually got so annoyed at having to step over Louie's long legs that he attacked him with a fire extinguisher. — Laura Hillenbrand

The truth is that all this was just part of the suicide process. Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.
Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.
If a tress falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?
And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven This wasn't a question of whether I was going to kill myself. This, this effort, this money and time, the writing team, the drugs, the diet, the agent, the flights of stairs going up to nowhere, all this was so I could off myself with everyone's full attention. — Chuck Palahniuk

I turned up my nose at yoga for years. I was a rugby player growing up. But now I know. When I'm on those long international flights, like 22 hours from L.A. to Sydney, I'll get up sometimes and do yoga in the aisle just to stretch out a little bit. — Jason O'Mara

running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors. The thought that his father's death had made no difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper. "Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, springing — Edith Wharton

During my training to become an airline captain, I had to learn how to navigate an airplane over long distances. Flights over huge oceans, crossing extensive deserts, and connecting continents need careful planning to ensure a safe arrival at the planned destination. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

If we're on long-haul flights I've been known to sleep on the floor so I hear the engine. — Wayne Rooney

As to rocket ships flying between America and Europe, I believe it is worth seriously trying for. Thirty years ago persons who were developing flying were laughed at as mad, and that scorn hindered aviation. Now we heap similar ridicule upon stratoplane or rocket ships for trans-Atlantic flights. (1933)
[Predicting high-altitude jet aircraft for routine long-distance travel.] — Auguste Piccard

Most people are flying to Heathrow because it's a hub, so they can fly on to other places, often long-distance flights. If they can't go on those long-distance flights from Heathrow, they will go to Paris, they will go to Amsterdam, they will go to Frankfurt, because those are viable alternatives. — Geoff Hoon

Before the current decade ends, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing suborbital flights aboard privately funded vehicles ... It won't be too long before bright young men and women set their eyes on careers in Earth orbit and say: "I want to work 200 kilometers from home-straight up!" — Arthur C. Clarke

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that you knew or had seen or had heard someone say. — Ernest Hemingway,

It was a long corridor and it branched into other corridors and it led her up short flights of steps which mounted to others again. There — Frances Hodgson Burnett

I don't really like long flights any more - I find them too tiring. Flying always involves the same things these days - huge crowds at airports, waiting around, late take-offs, weather problems, and so on. I don't really enjoy travelling. I don't imagine anyone does except young children. — Christopher Lee

The genus Drosophila is one of the great success stories. There's hundreds of species within the genus. They're on every continent except Antarctica, they're in tropical rain forests, they're in deserts, they've evolved many exotic mating behaviors, and they're capable of incredibly long-distance flights. — Michael Dickinson