Airship Quotes

Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all - a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this.
[On British railway dining cars] ~ Simon Bradley

[...] he would see that birth and death were only two tremendous moments in an eternal waking, and his face would glow with amazement as he understood this; he would feel - gently he grasped the copper handle of the door - the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover the hidden depths of human existence, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and, then - he started opening the door - he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day's-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the half-light. ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Hate and anger are a journey with no destination. They accomplish nothing."
-Sir Karotene, First Officer on the Exploricus airship ~ Patalosh The Time Travelers

All right boys, let's sail away! Show those bastards how airship pirates fly a ship! ~ Katherine McIntyre

You must live a very free life."
"Me?" she laughed. "I am not who swoops out of the sky to rain fire on pirates!"
"Yeah, but before this I never did much. I mean I did a lot, but ... I lived in a room at a university, and my whole world was in that little room. There was this world inside my head."
De la Fitte studied his head as if she could see through his skull to a little globe inside it somewhere. ~ Sam Starbuck

She is mad, and I am sane. To speak to her, even the first word, would be an acknowledgement and an acceptance of her madness, and from there I would have no choice but to follow her down the hole until both of us would be here alone in this ship among the clouds, endlessly circling the earth, our needs carefully ministered to by mechanical men, howling ourselves hoarse and counting off the ticks of the clock before the moon falls out of the sky. ~ Dexter Palmer

What I wouldn't give for a little old smuggling job. ~ Katherine McIntyre

Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child. ~ E. M. Forster

Rare stories traveled of those who rose too high, the ships who sailed like Icarus towards the sun.

And like him, they crashed and burned for their arrogance. ~ Katherine McIntyre

I'll start in the air," I said, far more steadily than I thought I could, considering. I knelt to tie the shirt around his thigh, cinching it tight above the wound; he stiffened but let me finish the knot. "The air first, the airship, and then-then I'll dive."
"You can't swim," broke in Armand. "You told me that you can't."
"Maybe I can now. If I'm a dragon."
"Don't be an idiot! If you can't swim, you can't swim, Eleanore! You'll drown out there, and what the bloody hell do you think you're going to do anyway to a U-boat? Bite it open?"
I stood again. "Yes! If I must! I don't hear you coming up with a better-"
"You'll die out there!"
"Or we'll all die here!"
"We're going to find another way!"
"You two work on that. I'm off." I fixed them both with one last, vehement look, the Turn rising inside me.
Remember this. Remember them, this moment, this heartbreak, these two boys. Remember that they loved you.
Armand had reached for my shoulders. "I forbid-Eleanore, please, no-"
"No," echoed Jesse, speaking at last. "You're not going after the submarine, Lora. You won't need to."
Armand and I paused together, glancing down at him. I stood practically on tiptoe, so ready to become my other self.
Jesse climbed clumsily to his feet. When he swayed, we both lunged to catch him.
"Armand will take me to the shore. I'll handle the U-boat."
"How?" demanded Armand at once.
But I understood. I could read him so wel ~ Shana Abe

A ship's captain was her master and the right hand of God in Heaven Himself, and concerned with matters of such grave importance that minor issues like food for the mortals in his command were entirely beneath him.
"I'll get someone else to take this duty, sir," Creedy said stoutly.
"The nonessential personnel are already on leave, XO," Grimm replied. "All the remaining hands are fully engaged in installing the new systems and making repairs. You know that."
"But, sir," Creedy said. "What will the crew say?"
"What they won't say, Byron, is anything like 'my captain allowed me to go hungry while demanding that I work without cease,'" Grimm said. ~ Jim Butcher

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. ~ Michael Denton

There was much more she would have liked to tell her brother. But within a few months, she would be able to tell him in person. When he learned of the attack on the airship, nothing would stop Archimedes and his wife from coming. But at least they would fly to the Red City instead of Krakentown, where he might be recognized as the smuggler Wolfram Gunther-Baptiste. One day, she might write a story inspired by that part of his career. She would call it The Idiot Smuggler Who Destroyed the Horde Rebellion's War Machines and Changed His Name to Avoid the Rebel Assassins. Zenobia would take pity on the idiot's sister and leave her out of the tale. She ~ Meljean Brook

But it won't be much of a battle, will it?" Alek asked. "What can an airship do to a pair of ironclads?"
"My guess is, we'll stay absolutely still for an hour. Just so we don't fall into any bad habits. ~ Scott Westerfeld

The last thing I remembered was joining the crew in a rendition of "Take to the Sky," but the rest of the time blurred after I drank absinthe with the Captain. ~ Katherine McIntyre

He depressed the rudder, and the Red Cloud shot earthward. Then, as the airship was turned about, the young inventor was allowed to try his hand at managing it. He said, afterward, that it was like guiding a fleecy cloud. ~ Victor Appleton

I had my father again.I had Bram back. We were a newly fashioned crew of soldiers and inventors and cheeky teenagers, armed with an airship and plenty or guns. We could, in theory, pack it all in if we wanted to, and strike out for part unknown. Colonize some little forgotten island, somewhere, and continue our adventures. Live generously; die gloriously. ~ Lia Habel

Gotten a good look at her face. But they didn't recognize her as Stark's cohort. They must not have been big on reading blogs or watching the news. Deirdre took the camera. "Sure. Where's the button?" He quickly showed her how to operate it, and Deirdre stepped back to get both of them in the frame. The camera had a telephoto lens. She aimed it at the top of the building, zooming in so that she could look at the skeletal upper levels, where they were preparing to moor a visiting dirigible. With such fantastic zoom, she could see that there were OPA guards in black suits waiting to receive the airship. ~ S.M. Reine

Charles realized his Academy office was far too small to contain the five feet of green eyed fury in front of his desk. Although, in fairness, an airship hanger might not have been large enough. ~ Eric James Spannerman

He might have perfect form and better swordsmanship, but I had one thing on my
side that stacked the deck in my favor. I was absolutely crazy. ~ Katherine McIntyre

When you cut it up, put the pieces in your mouth and swallowed them, the British hamburger shaped itself to the bottom on your stomach like ballast, while interacting with your gastric juices to form an incipient belch of enormous potential, an airship which had been inflated in a garage. This belch, when silently released, would cause people standing twenty yards away to start examining the soles of their shoes. The vocalized version sounded like a bag of tools thrown into a bog. ~ Clive James

I've always felt that stylists such as you have in America are ashamed of a car and are preoccupied with making it look like something else, like a submarine or an airship ... As an engineer, I revolt against this. ~ Alec Issigonis

Some days, the sheer amount of enemies we attracted made me question if maybe our crew was a little too trigger happy. That maybe we'd pissed in too many pots without thinking of the consequences.

But then I remembered most folks couldn't hold to a basic code of honor if it killed them. And kill them we did.

Repeatedly. ~ Katherine McIntyre