Air Travel Quotes

Granted, this system is insane, but we must not let sanity stand in the way of airport security. ~ Dave Barry

Why does a tragedy like 9/11 change everything about air travel, but numerous gun massacres CHANGE NOTHING? ~ Justine Bateman

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

People aren't just paying more to fill their gas tanks or when they pay for their heating bills for their home; they are paying more at the grocery store, on air travel and for many other daily expenses. ~ Dan Lipinski

It feels like flying and landing to all the continents of the world with the use of my imaginary paper that can floats in the air. ~ Alexina Benavidez

Now you can't even carry a nail clipper on a plane. Are they afraid you're going to go ... "All right! Give me the plane or the b*tch loses her cuticle." ? ~ Robin Williams

I was in the studio so much, it was about the search for air in a metaphoric sense, and the breathing has more to do with travel for me, about the search musically for open air. ~ Keren Ann

Despite living in this post-9/11 age of transnational terrorism, the risk of death during air travel has plummeted to the point where we now measure it in the 'per billions' of passengers. ~ Thomas P.M. Barnett

If the security personnel do their job properly, they just might cause you to miss your plane, thereby possibly saving your life. ~ Dave Barry

The planes are crowded and noisy and late, and everybody hates everybody. If armed terrorists had tried to hijack any of the flights I've been on lately, we passengers would have swiftly beaten them to death with those hard rolls you get with your in-flight meals. ~ Dave Barry

The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children. Of those four actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

When the plane is delayed, it's not the fault of the girl at the desk. I'm resigned to the fact that everything is out of my control and that air travel nowadays is barbaric. ~ Tom Conti

People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel. ~ Daniel Kahneman

They mention that it's a nonstop flight. Well, I must say I don't care for that sort of thing. Call me old fashioned, but I insist that my flight stop. Preferably at an airport. ~ George Carlin

Modern air travel means less time spent in transit. That time is now spent in transit lounges. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

For all the jokes and complaints about the aches of air travel, it's pretty marvelous, if you think about it. ~ Tsh Oxenreider

Where would we be without science? Sure, those boffins may have come up with occasionally handy items such as life-saving medicine, air travel and the internet, but science is also guilty of some terrible things, like eugenics and Jordan's breasts. ~ Ian O'Doherty

We've only had aircrafts for a hundred years, and yet look at us. So, I've become absolutely fascinated by this strange, bizarre world of airports, air travel and transportation. It's interesting. ~ Dallas Campbell

Sailboats are the slowest form of transportation on Earth with the possible exeption of airline flights that go through O'Hare. ~ Dave Barry

There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane: Either you have diarrhea, or you're anxious to meet people who do. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Been in a lot of time zones. Been on a lot of planes. Had a lot of complimentary honey-roasted peanuts whapped onto my tray table by hostile flight attendants. "Would you care for some peanuts, sir?" WHAP. Like that. The flight attendants hate us passengers, because we're surly to them because our flight is delayed. Our flight is always delayed. The Russians will never be able to get their missiles through the dense protective layer of delayed flights circling over the United States in complex, puke-inducing holding patterns. ~ Dave Barry

A shortage of airports runways and gates along outmoded air traffic control systems have made U.S. air travel the most congested in the world. ~ Ray LaHood

Is there any possibility of giving international air travel, which we all need and use and hate, a touch of glamour, or even of reliable, soulless efficiency? I suspect future historians will puzzle over our failure. But by then, of course, we shall be in the age of mass space travel, with its fresh and unimaginable crop of horrors. ~ Paul Johnson

Just as the invention of air travel had made it easy to go, but no easier to leave, the invention of time travel made time easy to pass, but no easier to endure. ~ Thea Lim

If the Wright brother were alive today Wilbur would have to fire Orville to reduce costs. ~ Herb Kelleher

Air travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo. ~ Al Gore

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

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

TWENTY YEARS AFTER the end of air travel, the caravans of the Traveling Symphony moved slowly under a white-hot sky. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an 'unaccompanied minor' made me blase about the rigors of air travel. ~ Shashi Tharoor

The thing I miss about Air Force One is they don't lose my luggage. ~ George H. W. Bush

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

If Charles Lindbergh, flying with no instruments other than a bologna sandwich, managed to cross the Atlantic and land safely on a runway completely covered with French people, why are today's airplanes, which are equipped with radar and computers and individualized liquor bottles, unable to cope with fog? ~ Dave Barry

In modern America, food is abundant everywhere except aboard commercial airplanes. ~ Dave Barry

The European Union spends most of its time either suing me, torturing me, criticizing me or condemning me for lowering the cost of air travel all over Europe. ~ Michael O'Leary

We all know we have a problem, a broad problem. Ninety-eight percent of the fuel that is used by our vehicles, our autos and trucks for personal and commercial purposes, for highway and air travel operates on oil. The world has the same problem. ~ John Olver

Funny, isn't it? The airlines go to all that trouble to keep you from taking a gun on board, then they just hand you a dinner roll you could kill a musk ox with. ~ Dave Barry

In a nut shell, air travel is the worst part about touring. ~ Eric Burdon

Air travel survived decades of terrorism, including attacks which resulted in the deaths of everyone on the plane. It survived 9/11. It'll survive the next successful attack. The only real worry is that we'll scare ourselves into making air travel so onerous that we won't fly anymore. ~ Bruce Schneier

The techno-political thriller and the romance novel serve as antidotes to the imagination rather than stimulants to it. For this reason they make for ideal reading in airports and airplanes. They effectively shut down the imagination by doing all its work for it. They leave the spirit or the soul - and ambiguity, for that matter - out of the equation. By shutting down the imagination, genre novels perform a useful service to the anxious air traveler by reducing his or her ability to speculate. For the most part, people on airplanes, and here I include myself, would rather not use their speculative imaginations at all; one consequence of this situation is that great poetry is virtually unreadable during turbulence, when the snack cart has been put away and the seat belts fastened. Enough anxiety is associated with air travel without Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus making it worse. ~ Charles Baxter

I don't want to be in a position that could make me vomit, like air travel. I've purloined airsick bags and stuffed them everywhere, just in case I ever feel the need to throw up. I haven't vomited since 1977, but I think about it all the time. I recognize that it's irrational, but I'd rather jump out of a window than vomit. ~ Scott Stossel

A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now. ~ Charles C. Mann

Furloughing a bunch of air traffic controllers has a pretty easy-to-predict effect on air travel: It causes delays. ~ Alex Pareene

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece. ~ Erica Jong

choosing an idyllic ocean cruise over the whirlwind body cavity search that was air travel. ~ Dan Fiorella

There's another problem," Percy said. "I'm not good with air travel. It's dangerous for a son of Neptune."
"You'll have to risk it ... and so will I," Frank said. "By the way, we're related."
Percy almost stumbled off the roof. "What? ~ Rick Riordan

This year, U.S. airlineswill carry a record 143 million passengers, who will be in the air for 382 million hours, during which they will be fed an estimated total of four peanuts. ~ Dave Barry

Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean when you think about it jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane it defies the gravity of a 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 seems 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. ~ Jim Butcher

Birds looked like an echo of birds, fat white clouds looked as if they were there to sell you fabric softener or air travel or health insurance. ~ Alexandra Kleeman

Each and every one of the security measures we implement serves an important goal: providing safe and efficient air travel for the millions of people who rely on our aviation system every day. ~ Janet Napolitano

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

In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Travel in car, because you can stop. Air travel any more is a nightmare. I think it's the same for everyone. If I have a choice to stand in line to get x-rayed, or see scenery, I'll take scenery. ~ Steve Kimock

A hundred years ago, it could take you the better part of a year to get from New York to California; whereas today, because of equipment problems at O'Hare, you can't get there at all. ~ Dave Barry

I convinced him his luggage had gone to that big Bermuda Triangle in the sky. ~ Erma Bombeck

During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, TV, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each part of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts. ~ David Bohm

Logically, he understood air travel was completely possible.
Emotionally, he found the idea of an enormous, tremendously heavy metal object filled with people propelling itself through the sky for thousands of miles completely improbable. ~ Marshall Thornton

People who can't hack it as Irwins because they're too violent go into the air travel industry. ~ Mira Grant

The glamour of air travel - its aspirational meaning in the public imagination - disappeared before its luxury did, dissipating as flying gradually became commonplace. ~ Virginia Postrel

Because it's cheaper and easier to fly than ever before, air travel is becoming democratized. ~ Peter Diamandis

What was an infant's view of air travel? You go to a special place, walk into a large room with seats in it, and sit down. The room rumbles and shakes for four hours. Then you get up and walk off. Magically, you're somewhere else. The means of transportation seems obscure to you, but the basic idea is easy to grasp, and precocious mastery of the Navier-Stokes equations is not required. ~ Carl Sagan

Flying is hours and hours of boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of sheer terror. ~ Pappy Boyington

The only thing to be said for air travel is speed. It makes possible travel on a scale unimaginable before our present age. Between the ages of 20 and four-score I visited every country in Europe, all save two in Latin America, ditto in Africa, and most of Asia, not counting eight trips to Australia and 60 to the United States - all by air. ~ Paul Johnson

I had arrived at the airport one hour early so that, in accordance with airline procedures, I could stand around. ~ Dave Barry

My family went to Toronto to visit relatives when I was 13 or 14. It was the first time we had ever been abroad. This was the early Eighties, and I remember the impossible glamour of air travel - my mum spending days trying to decide what she was going to wear on the plane. ~ John Niven

With air travel there is no distance, there is only time. ~ Judith M Bardwick

My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible. ~ Pico Iyer

Aviation, this young modern giant, exemplifies the possible relationship of women and the creations of science. Although women have not taken full advantage of its use and benefits, air travel is as available to them as to men. ~ Amelia Earhart

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

Monica nudged her husband's shoulder. "On-time flights are easier when you're behind the controls." Trent Fairchild and his two brothers owned and operated Fairchild Charters. A private air charter company with a fleet of jets, big and small, not to mention more helicopters than one could count, which was why they were attending the conference of International Emergency Medicine . . . a conference where professionals worked to improve the emergency response to natural disasters all over the world. "Is Glen with you?" Glen was Trent's brother and liaison to the fixed-wing portion of air travel for the sick and injured. ~ Catherine Bybee

The sun had reached the horizon, and the crickets slowed their chirping as the air began to cool. Sunset and sunrise, he thought, the edges of the day, were the only times you could see the sun move. It touched the top of the ridge and began to disappear. He reminded himself that it was the earth's rotation, that the sun itself only seemed to move, but what difference did that make? He felt he was watching time itself pass. The last bright quarter shrank to an eighth, a sixteenth, a point, and then nothing, the sun's dark negative lingering in his retina. ~ James A. McLaughlin

In addition to the smells of mince and pumpkin pies, the Sage and onions of turkey stuffing, another aroma floated in the air, the very essence of Santa Claus.
Years later, when I was grown up, I still remembered that marvelous fragrance and recognized it as Scotch whisky. ~ Lloyd Alexander

Renga with Katie


There's no better place
Than in each moment with you
Traveling through life

Regardless of place and time,
Or seasons and location,

I never look back
To a time without you there
And wish to return

We are each other's constant
In an ever changing world





On a pilgrimage
To no place particular,
Destinationless

Each moment we're arriving
At another sacred place

Appreciating,
Remembering life before
You opened my eyes

It's both vivid and soothing
Like I'd never had vision

Now I see the way,
As we travel together
The fog is lifted

Each sight reveals each other
Each step reveals another ~ Eric Overby

...in our own hearts we trust for our salvation, in the men that
surround us, in the sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds
that fill our ears, and in the air that fill our lungs. ~ Joseph Conrad

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Traveling is my form of self-education. Every stream I fish now is not as good as it used to be. Traveling is my form of self-education. Every stream I fish now is not as good as it used to be. If you keep your eyes open as you travel around, you realize we are destroying this planet. ~ Yvon Chouinard

There is, however, a strange, musty smell in the air that reminds me of something ... hmm ... yes ... I've got it ... there's a VMS nearby, or I'm a Blit. ~ Larry Wall

I think everybody has a dream of flying at least once in their life. For me, it's been over and over a recurring dream. It's mostly that. That desire to be as free as the birds, to be unhindered. I started off as - and am still - a free solo climber. So being in the air is a huge fear of mine. So there's a combination of going toward my fear as well as being fascinated with the air. ~ Dean Potter

Sometimes gaining and losing are more intimately related than we like to think. And some things cannot be moved or owned. Some light does not make it all the way through the atmosphere, but scatters ... The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not ... abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway ... Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Jill, a comprehensive school teacher in her early thirties, has put her dark past behind her to become a lady in control of her own life. Successful in her career, soon to be divorced and with no emotional ties, she is content. Except that one morning, while trying to find work for a recalcitrant Year 9 class, she finds herself in a dark and murky street in Victorian England. The image soon disappears and she is back in the classroom, but the children she was teaching have gone and so has an hour of her life. Soon Jill finds herself living two parallel lives, one as a teacher and the other as a Victorian governess. And this is just the beginning ~ Jan Hunter

The air between them began to settle into a silence. Awkward, yet softly exciting. Like an unexpected snow day. ~ Suzanne Palmieri

We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God's good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old. ~ Winston S. Churchill

The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is midly zen. There are public road signs that say "Gusty Winds May Exist". This seems more like lazy philosophy than travel advice. ~ Chuck Klosterman

There are only two rules. One is E. M. Forster's guide to Alexandria; the best way to know Alexandria is to wander aimlessly. The second is from the Psalms; grin like a dog and run about through the city. ~ Jan Morris

I was misplaced air
that cradled all around you,
held to cobalt skies
to shelter your fledgling wings. ~ Phen Weston

As a quarterback, you have to love it. As much as you like to turn around and hand the ball off - the whole traditional football game - as a quarterback, you gotta love putting it in the air. ~ Joe Montana

The time I like listening to music most on headphones is, I have a game I play with my brother, he's a musician as well.And he sends me MIDI files of keyboard pieces. So, these are pieces where I just get a MIDI file; I don't know what instrument he was playing them on; I know nothing about his section of the sound of the piece, and then when I'm sitting on trains I do a lot of train travel I turn them into pieces of music. And I love to do that; it's my favorite hobby. ~ Brian Eno

How can you say anything other than Ratatouille is Pixar's best movie? Your a chef, for Christ's sake," Sue said.
Lou smiled at Sue's accusatory tone. She needed this distraction.
Harley rolled his eyes and said, "You're letting your biases show, Sue. Up uses music better- like a character. The opening fifteen minutes is some of the best filmmaking- ever. And who doesn't love a good squirrel joke?"
"But Ratatouille brings it all back to food." Sue waved a carrot in the air to emphasize her point. "They made you want to eat food cooked by a rat! I'd eat the food; it looked magnificent. That rat cooked what he loved; what tasted good. Like I've been telling Lou, we should cook food from the heart, not just the cookbook. ~ Amy E. Reichert

My real journey had very little to do with traveling Europe, and a whole lot to do with traveling my own mind. ~ Christina Baldwin

You know how good-byes feel. How the air gets excited when all its ions and electrical charges are disrupted, first by the intent to leave and later by the leaving itself. Then, when the bodies move away through space, they create empty pockets where feelings get caught and eddy around in the vacuum, creating little vortices of relief or sadness or confusion. ~ Ruth Ozeki

I travel a fair amount, read on the plane, and I read fast. ~ Emily Oster

Although goals are important, having a plan of action is vital to the success of those goals. Having a goal with no plan of action is like wanting to travel to a new destination without having a map. ~ Steve Maraboli

Er, Nick can see illusions, so he'll be going into Salisbury. Who - ?"

Now there was a question hanging in the car like very awkward air freshener. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

A wise walker will set out early, keeping an open mind on how far to travel, allowing each day's adventure to evolve. ~ John Litwinovich

I know that you don't believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Queen of my tub, I merrily sing,
While the white foam rises high,
And sturdily wash, and rinse, and wring,
And fasten the clothes to dry;
Then out in the free fresh air they swing,
Under the sunny sky.

I wish we could wash from our hearts and our souls
The stains of the week away,
And let water and air by their magic make
Ourselves as pure as they;
Then on the earth there would be indeed
A glorious washing-day!

Along the path of a useful life
Will heart's-ease ever bloom;
The busy mind has no time to think
Of sorrow, or care, or gloom;
And anxious thoughts may be swept away
As we busily wield a broom.

I am glad a task to me is given
To labor at day by day;
For it brings me health, and strength, and hope,
And I cheerfully learn to say-
"Head, you may think; Heart, you may feel;
But Hand, you shall work always! ~ Louisa May Alcott

Do not go where you don't belong. I scoffed. That sounded like an invitation if I ever heard one. ~ Dinah Katt

I was having a field day down the Westend; my deep pockets were jingling and full of money nearly every day of the week. My brother's bird, Irene, wanted a fur coat, so I got her one by throwing a brick through the shop window and grabbing the coat off the shop dummy. Once I got to the bed-sit, I put the jacket on and waltzed in to the flat looking like Liberace, the two of them burst out laughing. Irene was like a tramp eating chips.
'Let's try it on, Jimmy, please?'
As she swooned around like Joan Collins with the fur coat on, she had the air of a council estate beauty queen about her. ~ Stephen Richards

I'd blurted out the question only to keep him from noticing that I was working my hands free, but the Warden behind me, some young brown-haired surfer dude, yelled a warning. "She's getting loose!"
Narc. ~ Rachel Caine

He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul's head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien