Landings Quotes

If you jump to conclusions, you make terrible landings. ~ Terry McMillan

Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars. ~ George Steiner

Almost everything else I have done during my adult years has been affected to some extent by my name - by my father's position, if you will. But in the air, I had no name; to the Federal Aviation Agency I was simply Comanche Nine-Nine POP. The quality of my landings, navigation and judgment were mine alone. ~ John Eisenhower

The amphibious landing of U.S. Marines on September 1950 at Inchon, on the west coast of Korea, was one of the most audacious and spectacularly successful amphibious landings in all naval history. ~ Bernard Brodie

We live on the flat, on the level, and yet - and so - we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracting force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both. ~ Julian Barnes

Churchill strikes a note in my life because my father worked on Mulberry Harbour, which was the code name for the temporary concrete harbours which were towed across the Channel to make the D-day landings in France possible. ~ Ridley Scott

Apollo 11 was the movie premiere of moon landings, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Neil was a bit of a mystic, but also a taciturn guy from what I can tell. He really saw the moon as looking like the American high desert. He wasn't someone who dealt in metaphors. ~ Lily Koppel

The brain is biology's greatest challenge. Perhaps in a sense it is the greatest challenge for science as a whole, beyond moon landings, the ultimate particles of the physicist and the depths of astronomical space. ~ Steven Rose

The elements of trial and error, similar to earth and sky, and fire and water, delineates the constituent modules of our lives. Living robustly includes more failures than successes. We achieve adeptness to living by exhibiting a willingness to make good faith mistakes and learn from each misadventure. Every effort that fails to achieve our expected result is understandably frustrating. The fact is that without ideas and dreams and devoid of occasional crash landings, a person can never hope to achieve any worthy acts to temper resounding personal disappointment. Meaningful success is ultimately defined when a person dies, when an entire life's work devoted to performing passionate and compassionate enterprises can be judge as a whole unit. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I know people have very little control on an airplane, and that exacerbates the fear of flying. As you probably know, flying is a lot safer than driving. If you think of the thousands of take-offs and landings every day--and the miniscule amount of crashes--that has to put your mind at ease. ~ Wendy Sue Knecht

Death is the great adventure beside which moon landings and space trips pale in insignificance. ~ Joseph Bayly

Abigail read in Reader's Digest that all plane landings were controlled crashes. Like the way we live our lives, she thought. Bumble through doing the best we can and hoping that some benevolence keeps us from crashing. ~ Chris Abani

We take too much for granted when it comes to separations and reunions, and pay the price for not understanding the natural human imperative to make and continually remake secure connections with our most important others. Don't take my word for this. Check your own launchings and landings. Play with them. Perform them properly, and then improperly or not at all. Compare the difference. Experience for yourself. ~ Stan Tatkin

The landings below the bridge were perfect alcoves for conspiracy. ~ Christopher Moore

Luke chuckled. "Did anyone mention you fall like an angel?" "Or a bag of rocks?" I asked. "That's what it feels like. I'm good at crash landings. ~ C.L.Stone

I blaze with a deep sullen magic, smell lust like a heron on fire; all words I form into castles then storm them with soldiers of air. What I seek is not there for asking. My armies are fit and well trained. This poet will trust her battalions to fashion her words into blades. At dawn I shall ask them for beauty, for proof that their training went well. At night I shall beg their forgiveness as I cut their throats by the hill. My navies advance through the language, destroyers ablaze in high seas. I soften the island for landings. With words, I enlist a dark army. My poems are my war with the world. I blaze with a deep southern magic. The bombardiers taxi at noon. There is screaming and grief in the mansions and the moon is a heron on fire. ~ Pat Conroy

In a Bloomberg poll, 88% of respondents said that Wall Street bonuses should either be banned outright or taxed at 50%. Just 7% said they should remain an incentive. To put that 7% figure in perspective, 6% of Americans believe the moon landings were a hoax; 7% believe Elvis lives; 24% believe that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim; 41% believe in ESP; and 48% believe in creationism. Americans will believe anything, it seems-except the idea that incentivizing bankers at systemically important institutions to take big risks makes any sense at all. ~ Felix Salmon

A night of exhilaration, of boredom and terror, in which the merest of sounds took on other forms - grew large in the expanse of darkness. After several hours the sheep gradually stopped calling to each other from accross the river banks, and a brittle quiet descended. I desperately wanted to walk down to the water's edge. To see the black river in the moonlight. But a mixture of reason and fear kept me locked along the safe paths high above. ~ Richard Skelton

People frequently die in fires or crash landings because they try to escape through the same door they used when they entered. ~ Susan David

Gray mattresses with red and blue stripes in something that looks like a hallway or an overly long waiting room. In any case, his memory is frozen in immediate past like a faceless man in a dentist's chair. There are houses and streets that run down to the sea, dirty windows and shadows on staircase landings. We hear someone say "a long time ago it was noon," the light bounces off the center of immediate past, something that's neither a screen nor attempts to offer images. Memory slowly dictates soundless sentences. We imagine that all of this has been done to avoid confusion, a layer of white paint covers the film on the floor. Fleeing together long ago became living together and thus the integrity of the gesture was lost; the shine of immediate past. ~ Roberto Bolano

Wittgenstein had helped fake the moon landings. ~ Mark Adams

how do i welcome in kindness
when i have only practiced
spreading my legs for the terrifying
what am i to do with you
if my idea of love is violence
but you are sweet
if your concept of passion is eye contact
but mine is rage
how can i call this intimacy
if i crave sharp edges
but your edges aren't even edges
they are soft landings
how do i teach muself
to accept a healthy love
if all i've ever known is pain ~ Rupi Kaur

A persistent case of the bingos was enough to wash a man out of night carrier landings. That did not mean you were finished as a Navy pilot. It merely meant that you were finished so far as carrier ops were concerned, which meant that you were finished so far as combat was concerned, which meant you were no longer in the competition, no longer ascending the pyramid, no longer qualified for the company of those with the right stuff. ~ Tom Wolfe

There were railroads in the wilderness now; people who used to go overland by carriage or horseback to the River landings for the Memphis and New Orleans steamboats could take the train from almost anywhere now. And presently Pullmans too, all the way from Chicago and the Northern cities and the Northern money, the Yankee dollars arriving between sheets and even in drawing rooms to open the wilderness, nudge it further and further toward obsolescence with the whine of saws; what had been one vast unbroken virgin span was now booming with cotton and timber both. Or rather, booming with simple money: increment's troglodyte which had fathered twin ones: solvency and bankruptcy, the three of them booming money into the land so fast now that the problem was to get rid of it before it whelmed you into strangulation. ~ William Faulkner

Hand in hand, we head for the kiss and cry. Today, we're going to kiss. Sometimes, we'll cry. There'll be broken tree branches. Misunderstandings and crash landings. It turns out all relationships are like Axels. They take a leap of faith and they have their ups and downs.
But it's not about falling, it's about what you do after the fall. Whatever happens, we'll pick ourselves u. Brush ourselves off. And circle around for another attempt. ~ Katie Van Ark

I can't think of anything specific growing up that pointed me toward NASA at all. I was interested in the Moon landings just about the same as everyone else of my generation. But I never really thought about being an astronaut or working in space myself. ~ Laurel Clark

The landings were dirty and the walls were bare. This stairway brought me into the balcony, and I sat there in the dark, thinking that nothing now was going to save me, that no pretty girl with new shoes was going to cross my path in time. ~ John Cheever

Night landings were a routine part of carrier operations - and perhaps the best of all examples of how a man's accumulated good works did him no good whatsoever at each new step up the great pyramid, of how each new step was an absolute test, and of how each bright new day's absolutes - chosen or damned - were built into the routine. ~ Tom Wolfe

Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it's sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest. ~ Anna Quindlen

Well, I think of the folks who are the climate deniers as the flat Earthers and the people who say the moon landings never happened. ~ Jeffrey Kluger

Shorten the runway and you have fewer takeoffs and landings, shorten the runway and you enhance safety and reduce the noise, ... It also reduces the justification for the buyout as it is now being proposed. ~ David Shore

Some of the greatest reality television we ever had was the moon landings. When you think about it, that was human emotion and people, unscripted, working with each other - and millions and millions of people around the world, glued to their television sets to share real-time in a brand new, fascinating human experience. ~ Chris Hadfield

On the good ship Lollipop Its a sweet trip To the candy shop Where bon-bon's play, On the sunny beach Of peppermint bay Lemonade stands, Everywhere Crackerjack bands, Fill the air, And there you are, Happy landings on a chocolate bar. See the sugar bowl Do a tootsie roll In a big bad devils food cake, If you eat too much, Oh, oh, You'll awake, With a tummy ache. ~ Shirley Temple

Now I know why they tell you to put your head between your knees on crash landings. You think you're going to kiss your ass good-bye. ~ Terry Hanson