Airplanes Quotes

“That's the thing about flying: You could talk to someone for hours and never even know his name, share your deepest secrets and then never see them again.”
― Jennifer E. Smith, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

“But remember this, Japanese boy... airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.”
― Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises

“Why don't they make the whole plane out of that black box stuff?”
― Steven Wright

“[Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!”
― Anne Carson, Short Talks

“And like no other sculpture in the history of art, the dead engine and dead airframe come to life at the touch of a human hand, and join their life with the pilot's own.”
― Richard Bach, A Gift of Wings

“The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thousand feet. Something like four miles. When the steep glide began, people rose, fell, collided, swam in their seats. Then the serious screaming and moaning began. Almost immediately a voice from the flight deck was heard on the intercom: "We're falling out of the sky! We're going down! We're a silver gleaming death machine!" This outburst struck the passengers as an all but total breakdown of authority, competence and command presence and it brought on a round of fresh and desperate wailing.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“At least when I get on the Boston train I have a good chance of landing in the South Station
And not in that part of the daily press which is reserved for victims of aviation.”
― Ogden Nash, Hard Lines

“A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.”
― Russell Baker

“Where can one buy a lit of that *Right Stuff* bravado required to shrug off the fact that your airplane is now a convertible?”
― Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter

“Old Tom giggled, "Fooled ya, huh, Ma? We aimed to fool ya, and we done it. Jus' stood there like a hammered sheep. Wisht Grampa'd been here to see. Looked like somebody'd beat ya between the eyes with a sledge. Grampa would a whacked 'imself so hard he'd a throwed his hip out–like he done when he seen Al take a shot at that grea' big airship the army got. Tommy, it come over one day, half a mile big, an' Al gets the thirty-thirty and blazes away at her. Grampa yells, 'Don't shoot no fledglin's, Al; wait till a growed-up one goes over,' an' then he whacked 'imself an' throwed his hip out.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Wenn bei Flugzeugen die Motoren ausfallen, ist das nicht das Ende des Flugs. Die Flugzeuge fallen nicht wie Steine vom Himmel. Sie gleiten weiter, die riesengroßen, mehrstrahligen Passagierflugzeuge eine halbe bis Dreiviertelstunde lang, um dann beim Versuch des Landens zu zerschellen. Die Passagiere merken nichts. Fliegen fühlt sich bei ausgefallenen Motoren nicht anders an als bei arbeitenden. Es ist leiser, aber nur ein bißchen leiser: Lauter als die Motoren ist der Wind, der sich an Rumpf und Flügeln bricht. Irgendwann sind beim Blick durchs Fenster die Erde oder das Meer bedrohlich nah. Oder der Film läuft, und die Stewardessen und Stewards haben die Jalousien geschlossen. Vielleicht empfinden die Passagiere den ein bißchen leiseren Flug sogar als besonders angenehm.
Der Sommer war der Gleitflug unserer Liebe.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“The biggest environmental change I noticed during COVID-19 was the absence of airplanes in the sky.”
― Steven Magee

“As she began to doze, she wondered if when you rode in airplanes, love, even old impossible love, sent hearts tumbling end over end.”
― Laird Hunt, Zorrie

“The new transportation system is multi-modal, autonomous and electric. People utilize a variety of vehicles including cars, bicycles, passenger drones, hoverboards, airplanes, boats, rockets and more. And with ease, efficiency and comfort. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we’re making that real.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Airplanes are white, like Pekin ducks. And when they are on flat ground, that possibility of flight fills the air.”
― Jarod Kintz, The Lewis and Clark of The Ozarks

“In the quiet, I talked to my friend, who happened to be a T-33, and asked point-blank the questions I could never answer.

'What are you, airplane? What is it about you and all your wide family that has made so many men leave all they know and come to you? Why do they waste good human love and concern on you who are nothing but so many pounds of steel and aluminum and gasoline and hydraulic fluid?”
― Richard Bach, A Gift of Wings

“If Tesla autopilot cars were airplanes, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) would have grounded them.”
― Steven Magee

“As I stood there in the first hour of the night, what I felt most was the connection between the deaths of Andrew and my grandparents, between my life and Andrew's crash. The sky and the events in my life were not a web of inevitable synchronicities. It was easier for me to believe in these fluke alignments than to decide on the trajectory of my life. As I tried to force logic together, the center pushed itself apart.”
― Tom Griggs, Paul Kwiatkowski

“As I stood there in the first hour of the night, what I felt most was the connection between the deaths of Andrew and my grandparents, between my life and Andrew's crash. The sky and the events in my life were not a web of inevitable synchronicities. It was easier for me to believe in these fluke alignments than to decide on the trajectory of my life. As I tried to force logic together, the center pushed itself apart.”
― Tom Griggs

“At 30,000 feet up
The mind has plenty of space to wander:”
― Eugene Redmond

“At last they came to a hill and abandoned their bikes at the bottom. As they crested the knoll, Helen felt as though they were creeping upon some great secret and on the other side they’d find a giant sleeping or a black X with three shovels beside it. What they found was magic by a different name. Planes buzzed on runways like bees in a jar, and when one took off, a roar filled the air. As it lifted away from the earth, a breeze swept over their hilltop, and it left Helen wondering if they had been touched by the magic or if it was truly only a breeze.”
― Corinne Beenfield, The Ocean's Daughter :

“In the era of untested wireless technology, it is a good time to avoid flying in small airplanes.”
― Steven Magee

“Acclimatization to high altitudes used to occur naturally until the adoption of the car and airplanes.”
― Steven Magee

“I develop altitude sickness at just 1,000 feet. At what altitude do you develop it?”
― Steven Magee

“He had come to see that people were blind to tragedy till they experienced it firsthand, and that they were willing to risk the unknown if it meant they could make money in the interim. This was the case not just with small Indian markets, with their reluctance to secure themselves, but with the U.S. as well: Airlines had known for years about the danger of hijackings, but had lobbied against security because it cost time and money to process passengers. Better to let a plane be occasionally hurled off track, the heads of the airlines reasoned, than to hemorrhage money in the terminals.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Let the living fly. The machine must fall. The machine in the air must fail at some point, emptiness always prevails.”
― Gabriela Ponce, Blood Red

“I flew on a Boeing 737 Max 9 in 2019. I remember it had a very weird climb to cruising altitude compared to other airplanes I had flown on. It was also a wireless WiFi streaming entertainment airplane that needed passengers to use their phones to stream to the airline app that had to be installed prior to take off. It had weird cabin lighting I had not seen before.”
― Steven Magee

“Despite the crashes, airplanes remain one of the safest forms of transportation known to man, as long as you are not part of the crew.”
― Steven Magee

“The 737 Max will be remembered as the airplane that trashed Boeing’s global reputation.”
― Steven Magee

“An airplane's soul, which [the pilot] can never see or touch, is something that her pilot senses: an eagerness to fly; a little bit of performance that according to the charts should not be there, but is; a spirit behind the bullet-holed mass of torn metal with three propellers feathered, touching down on an English airfield. Not the metal, but the soul of an airplane is what her pilot wants to fly, and the reason he paints the name on her cowling. And with that soul, all planes have an immortality that you can feel when you walk onto any airport.”
― Richard Bach, A Gift of Wings