Quotes by Pilots

Mechanically I carried on across the Irish Sea, noticing with a jaundiced eye that it had suddenly lost the sinister threat of no-man's-land and was transformed into a placid highway where ferry-steamers would soon chug peacefully over the unmarked graves of gallant seamen.
Jackie Moggridge
What the student calls a tragedy the master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bach
The more I want to get something done the less I call it work.
Richard Bach
Ask yourself the secret of your success. Listen to your answer and practice it.
Richard Bach
What the student calls a tragedy the master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bach
Can miles truly separate you from friends. ... If you want to be with someone you love aren't you already there?
Richard Bach
There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves no matter how unpleasant are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn whatever steps we take they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.
Richard Bach
What the caterpillar calls a tragedy the Master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bach
Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air. The author knows it is an impossible task - that is why he keeps on trying.
David Beaty
Grip had been hungry ever since the first youthful spots on his sheets. Wanting to try what others only fantasized about, finding his way to the fearless ones who laughed back, the ones who also wanted it. Games with new positions had started before the end of adolescence. Later: bruises, leather straps, and candles—anything that excited—on airplanes, in hotel elevators with the emergency stop button pushed.
Robert Karjel
That is a terrifically intimate thing, you know? Letting a stranger light your cigarette. Leaning forward so he can hold a flame to your lips. Pausing to breathe in before you pull back again.
Elizabeth Wein
We are game-playing, fun-having creatures, we are the otters of the universe.
Richard Bach
Southampton's barrage balloons floated gleaming in the moonlight like the ghosts of elephants and hippos.
Elizabeth Wein
It's not unreal to me yet, though it might get that way soon. It still feels very real. And not even horrible -- the dead are just the dead. I am convinced that the living people they once were would have been proud of their protective bodies hoodwinking their murderers to save someone else. [..] But it's not civilized. There is something indecent about it -- really foully indecent. The civilized Rose-person in me, who still seems to exist beneath the layers of filth, knows this. [..] I have become so indifferent about the dead.
Elizabeth Wein
You can't just sit in a corner weeping or you'll die.
Elizabeth Wein
I ken who you are! You're Strathfearn's granddaughter. Julie Stuart, is it? Och, aye, Lady Julia! Well then, Lady Julia, tell me -- who don't you deserve a glass of water?
Elizabeth Wein
Och, they suit you, Queenie! Promise me you'll wear them.
Elizabeth Wein
He wanted to cut the man’s throat. Never in his life had he been so overpowered by such a desire to kill someone. It was a strange feeling, sweet and driven. In one leap he could be on him. His legs wanted to do it; they trembled with anticipation.
Robert Karjel
Driving like a man is one of her few foibles.
Elizabeth Wein
Inspector Milne's suspicious prying appeared to have awakened her inner Bolshevik, and so I discovered my own lady mother is not above quietly circumventing the law.
Elizabeth Wein
There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go....
Richard Bach
I see Earth! It is so beautiful.
Yuri Gagarin
Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead.
Richard Bach
Nothing boosts confidence quite like simulating a disaster, engaging with it fully, both physically and intellectually, and realising you have the ability to work the problem.
Chris Hadfield
Some think of Islam as an expedient jobs program that moves the female half of the population out of the way.
William Langewiesche
If I'd defined success very narrowly, limiting it to peak, high-visibility experiences, I would have felt very unsuccessful and unhappy during those years. Life is just a lot better if you feel you're having 10 wins a day rather than a win every 10 years or so.
Chris Hadfield
These are just stories, you know. They are part of what we are, but they are not the real thing. All this year I’ve been thinking, What would White Raven do? And today, every time I thought it, I just didn’t care what White Raven would do. So today I’ve just done what I would do. I’ve just done what I think is right. I’m not going to stop making up stories. But I’m thinking now that they aren’t just for pretending to be someone else, someone more exciting, someone braver than you really are. They are not always jut a maze to get lost in so you can run away from life. They can just as well be maps to help you navigate.
Elizabeth Wein
I was amongst them – the first female pilot who had got admission to the Sturmoviks…Since my childhood I’d been lucky enough to meet good people. Wherever I studied, wherever I worked I would meet loyal friends, kind-hearted tutors. I was trained at the factory school by the old craftsman Goubanov, I was assisted by the engineer Aliev, who was the shift boss, in my transfer to the most important sector of operations – the tunnel. I was trained by the superb instructor Miroevskiy in the aeroclub, the secretary of the Ulyanovsk District Comsomol Committee gave me a hand at a very hard moment of my life, then there was Maria Borek from Leningrad, the Secretary of the Smolensk District Comsomol Committee, the Commissar of the Smolensk aeroclub…Was it really possible to count all those who had warmed my soul with their sympathy and human kindness and helped me to realize my dream!
Anna Timofeeva-Egorova
if you argue for your limitations they are yours
Richard Bach
Value the wisdom of humility, as well as the sense of perspective it gives you.
Chris Hadfield
And I envied her that she had chosen her work herself and was doing what she wanted to do. I don't suppose I had any idea what I 'wanted' and so I was chosen, not choosing. There's glory and honor in being chosen. But not much room for free will.
Elizabeth Wein
The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, 'I've gotresponsibilities.
Richard Bach
No one does anything uncharacteristic of who they are.
Richard Bach
There is one potential problem with automation: that it will be accompanied by complacency and ignorance.
Richard de Crespigny
If you want something to happen, you must make it happen, because if you really don't want it, it's not going to happen without you. You can't make other people do things for you. You can't wait for people to come and give it to you. You must go out and get it.
Olga Custodio
Once you start something, finish it. Never give up...
Kenny Wayne Fields
Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can't feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful.
Elizabeth Wein
I believe that love is better than hate. And that there is more nobility in building a chicken coop than in destroying a cathedral.
Betty Greene
Believe you know all the answers, and you know all the answers. Believe you're a master, and you are.
Richard Bach
But a part of me lies buried in lace and roses on a riverbank in France-a part of me is broken off forever. A part of me will be unflyable, stuck in the climb.
Elizabeth Wein
I love the story of a thing. I love a thing for what it means a thousand times more than for what it's worth.
Elizabeth Wein
It had never occurred to me that simply being with a fellow prisoner would make me feel like I was still in prison.
Elizabeth Wein
I am like a ruined piece of parchment scrawled over and over again with your name, so many times it has become illegible.
Elizabeth Wein
Just read The Virtue of Minding Your Own Business. Oh my, what currents run deep! Beautifully seen, beautifully told. Praise praise praise . . . Pardon my French, but you are one darn major American writer!"---Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions, on Sandcastle and Other Stories
Richard Bach
It is possible there are some things you want so badly that you will change your life to make them happen.
Elizabeth Wein
My optimism and confidence come not from feeling I'm luckier than other mortals, and they sure don't come from visualizing victory. They're the result of a lifetime spent visualizing defeat and figuring out how to prevent it. Like most astronauts, I'm pretty sure that I can deal with what life throws at me because I've thought about what to do if things go wrong, as well as right. That's the power of negative thinking.
Chris Hadfield
What matters most:"What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh."Wind, Sand and Stars.
Richard Bach
I wasn't lonely. Loneliness, I think, has very little to do with location. It's a state of mind. In the centre of every city are some of the loneliest people in the world. If anything, because our whole planet was just outside the window, I felt even more aware of and connected to the seven billion other people who call it home.
Chris Hadfield
The opposite of Loneliness is not Togetherness , It's Intimacy
Richard Bach
With the earth firmly beneath our feet, we can approach what attracts us, and withdraw from what unnerves us. If there is real danger, we can run. Mobility means security, both physically and emotionally. Flying takes away our most basic way of regulating feelings.
Capt Tom Bunn LCSW
We reviewed the ways we had to bring customers: Method A, flying aerobatics at the edge of town. Method B, the parachute jump. Then we began experimenting with Method C. There is a principle that says if you lay out a lonely solitaire game in the center of the wilderness, someone will soon come along to look over your shoulder and tell you how to play your cards. This was the principle of Method C. We unrolled our sleeping bags and stretched out under the wing, completely uncaring.
Richard Bach
I need complicated railroad journeys and people speaking to me in foreign languages to keep me happy. I want to see the world and write stories about everything I see.
Elizabeth Wein
How does she do it? She makes it sound like she is so cut up to be giving them this information, and it's all just bumph out of her head. She never told them ANYTHING. I don't think she's given them the right name of any airfield in Britain except Mainsend and Buscot, which of course were where she was stationed. They could have easily checked. It's all so close to truth, and so glib--her aircraft identification is rather good considering what a fuss she makes about it. It makes me think of the first day I met her, giving those directions in German. So cool and crisp, such authority--suddenly she really was a radio operator, a German radio operator, she was so good at faking it. Or when I told her to be Jamie, how she just suddenly turned into Jamie.This confession of hers is rotten with error...
Elizabeth Wein
You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.
Richard Bach
Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.
Richard Bach
But one creature said at last, "I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.
Richard Bach
It's never either-or, never enjoyment versus advancement, so long as you conceive of advancement in terms of learning rather than climbing to the next rung of the professional ladder. You are getting ahead if you learn, even if you wind up staying on the same rung.
Chris Hadfield
Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers.
Richard Bach
Like attracts like. It'll surprise you as long as you live. Choose a love and work to make it true, and somehow something will happen, something you couldn't plan, will come along to move like to like, to set you loose, to set you on the way to your next brick wall.
Richard Bach
It was wonderful flirting with him, all the razor-edged literary banter, like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. A battle of wit, and a test, too.
Elizabeth Wein