Varig Air Quotes

To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins,
All that is non-air (if this indeed is not deception)
Is agony immobilized. While Time,
The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world. ~ Carson McCullers

I walked down the empty Broad to breakfast, as I often did on Sundays, at a tea-shop opposite Balliol. The air was full of bells from the surrounding spires and the sun, casting long shadows across the open spaces, dispelled the fears of night. The tea-shop was hushed as a library; a few solitary men in bedroom slippers from Balliol and Trinity looked up as I entered, then turned back to their Sunday newspapers. I ate my scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth follows a restless night. I lit a cigarette and sat on, while one by one the Balliol and Trinity men paid their bills and shuffled away, slip-slop, across the street to their colleges. It was nearly eleven when I left, and during my walk I heard the change-ringing cease and, all over the town, give place to the single chime which warned the city that service was about to start. ~ Evelyn Waugh

She was born as music–a single, mellow note suspended in the air. Suspended as if strung from nothing, held into possibilities of sound. Her clear note hung a lone, sweet tone in the midst of us all; as silence captured its ache and tenderly, reluctantly released it, dipped it lower into a breath of melancholy only to lift again to its earlier height both rich and real and complete–one solitary note swaying into the early dawn.

Emily arrived in the cold, grey hours of the newborn year, between the breathing dark and the pearl, winter light. A child of the dawn, before dawn broke. ~ Debi Cimo

Standing on the bare ground,
my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,
all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There's a moment on the arch of a jump, when you are neither rising nor falling. All you can see is the sky. All you can feel is the air and all you can hear is your heartbeat. That is all you are. Muscle and motion. It's called the deadpoint. I live for that. ~ Rhianna Pratchett

I'm very interested in buildings that adapt to changes in climatic conditions according to the seasons, buildings capable of responding to our physical and psychological needs in the way that clothing does. We don't turn on the air-conditioning as we walk through the streets in high summer. Instead, we change the character of the clothing by which we are protected. Layering and changeability: this is the key ... ~ Glenn Murcutt

Growing up I was afraid of heights; if I looked down I got instantly queasy. So what did I decide to do a few years ago? Go skydiving with my sisters. I stood on the ground, waiting for my turn, watching them jump out of a small plane strapped to some dude's back. All I could see were these tiny blond dots floating in the air. Then one of the instructors (thankfully he was on his own and not tied to a Hough!) lost control of his chute. It got twisted and he began to spiral toward the ground. Everyone watching below gasped; he was plunging to his death. At the very last second, he pulled his auxiliary chute and glided down to safety.
After landing, he walked right over to me. "Phew, that was a close one. Okay, Derek, you're up next. You're comin' with me."
I felt my stomach leap into my throat. Are you serious? You're a dead man walking and you want me to go up with you? Then reason kicked in: What was the likelihood lightning would strike twice and his chute would fail again? And if it did, clearly the guy knew how to get out of trouble.
"Um, okay…I guess." I read the disclaimer and signed it. In a nutshell, it said, "If you die, we're not responsible." Thanks a lot. ~ Derek Hough

The power of speech does not rely upon meaning. Words carry energy all by themselves. They vibrate through the air, with the intention of the speaker, shaping consciousness and touching hearts whether understood or not. ~ Daniel Black

That girl was gone; wolfgirl had returned. Wolfgirl, who was leaf dance and moon claw and tooth gleam. When Jupiter sizzled the air with lightning bolts, she caught them on the fly.
"Nice throw, Jupiter!"
"Nice catch, wolfgirl!"
Her mouth was a cavern of stars. ~ Franny Billingsley

When I forget that the stars shine in air
When I forget that beauty is in stars
When I forget that love with beauty is
Will I forget thee: till then all things else. ~ Philip James Bailey

There is nothing like the cure of fresh air for cases of bladder infection, paranoia, and Cartesian thinking. ~ Rawi Hage

I want to spend the rest of my days with you by my side. I'm on this earth to breathe your air. There's no one else I want to surrender to, fight for, be with. No one has ever made me feel the way you do." He paused. "You scare the shit out of me at the same time you make me feel invincible. You are the love of my life. ~ Robin Bielman

I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

All about us, in earth and air, wherever the eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in daisy, now in a wind-waft, a cloud, a sunset; a power that holds constant and sweetest relation with the dark and silent world within us. The same God who is in us, and upon whose tree we are the buds, if not yet the flowers, also is all about us- inside, the Spirit; outside, the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us ... ~ George MacDonald

I'm coming. I'm coming." Michaels rose up on his knees, gripped Judge's hips and yanked him into him, sat him on his rod while his orgasm made its dramatic appearance. His back went ramrod straight, the rapture consuming him. Michaels came on a silent yell. His volume was lacking, but his load was heavy and deep as it flowed inside his partner. Gave Judge all his power. "Damn. I feel you, Austin. So warm," Judge breathed. His partner was floating beneath him. He knew exactly what Judge was feeling. That flooding of warm come, filling him up and searing him inside. Even in the outdoors, the air was thick with their combined scents. More pungent and masculine than the sweet aromas of lavender and lilies. Michaels ~ A.E. Via

For some of us, the soul is resident in the sole, and yearns ceaselessly for light and air and self-expression. Our feet are our very selves. The touch of floor or carpet, grass or mud or asphalt, speaks to us loud and clear from the foot, that scorned and lowly organ as dear to us as our eyes and ears. ~ Barbara Holland

Making love. I've cringed every time Hester used those words. So off and awkward and unrelated to what actually goes on between two bodies. You make breakfast, you make time, you make the team. Love? Not so much. But I get it now. Like making fire. Not rubbing two sticks together to pull something out of thin air. More like finally being able, knowing enough, to warm your hands at something you built, stick by stick. ~ Huntley Fitzpatrick

You see I thought love got easier over, the years so it didn't hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash. She loved him. She was jealous. She mourned him like the dead. And he just smiled into the air, trapped in the seams of his mind. ~ Louise Erdrich

Standing side by side, on some rising ground, they felt, as they drank in the air, the pride of a life more free penetrating into the depths of their souls, with a superabundance of energy, a joy which they could not explain. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Each time my mother sank to the bottom of cold despair, she would always find a break in the ice above, to breathe new air, to find new purpose. She never indulged in self-pity, nor did she point the finger of blame for her misfortunes. Her heart was clear of bitterness. I believe that if a person's strength of character is measured at the end of his or her life, it is by these qualities - qualities that allow a life to be lived, free of those restraints we place upon ourselves. But that doesn't mean we should forget. ~ Gemma Liviero

How long in that same fit I lay, I have not to declare; But ere my living life returned, I heard and in my soul discerned Two VOICES in the air. "Is it he?" quoth one, "Is this the man? By him who died on cross, With his cruel bow he laid full low, The harmless Albatross. "The spirit who bideth by himself In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shot him with his bow." The other was a softer voice, As soft as honey-dew: Quoth he, "The man hath penance done, And penance more will do. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Even as birds on the wing meet the air continually, we, let us go where we will, meet with that Presence always and everywhere. ~ Francis De Sales

Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over - unless we find new ways of producing energy. ~ Barack Obama

Music can be appreciated from several points of view: the listener, the performer, the composer. In mathematics there is nothing analogous to the listener; and even if there were, it would be the composer, rather than the performer, that would interest him. It is the creation of new mathematics, rather than its mundane practice, that is interesting. Mathematics is not about symbols and calculations. These are just tools of the tradequavers and crotchets and five-finger exercises. Mathematics is about ideas. In particular it is about the way that different ideas relate to each other. If certain information is known, what else must necessarily follow? The aim of mathematics is to understand such questions by stripping away the inessentials and penetrating to the core of the problem. It is not just a question of getting the right answer; more a matter of understanding why an answer is possible at all, and why it takes the form that it does. Good mathematics has an air of economy and an element of surprise. But, above all, it has significance. ~ Ian Stewart

Since when is the intelligence agency supposed to be an air force of drones that goes around killing people? I believe that it's a job for the Department of Defense. ~ John McCain

The population of the United Kingdom has, for the first time, reached sixty million. If they stood on each other's shoulders they would reach perhaps twenty feet in the air before toppling over. ~ Eddie Mair

Are you aware it is private property? Why you'll be asking be to bomb Essen next. ~ Kingsley Wood

There is a certain degree of satisfaction in having the courage to admit one's errors. ~ Dale Carnegie

After the old man came up for air, he said, "C-O-P-D. Never even smoked a day in my life, you believe that? My lawyer thinks some chemical at the foundry did this to me but it's impossible to prove. I don't know what good a settlement would do me anyway. It's not like I can go to Disney World. If I see any money, I'm going to be irresponsible for the first time in my life and blow it all on hookers and coke. ~ Evan Ronan

With us air people, the future of our nation is indissolubly bound up in the development of air power. ~ Billy Mitchell

Do you know what it feels like right before lightning strikes? How you can feel the current running through your veins? The trembles of warning that ripple through the dense air? The crackling energy that bristles across your skin and shakes you to your bones? It's as if nitrogen and oxygen have come alive. As if every element in the air is combustible. Explosive. ~ A.L. Jackson

Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one's own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one's own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name. ~ Friedrich Hayek

I don't want to be pigeonholed into doing just romantic comedies. But they're fun, and especially for women, it's nice to go to see them and enjoy that breath of fresh air. ~ Kristen Bell

She could hear, some way off, her brothers calling to each other in the woods behind the house. She hoped desperately that their game wouldn't bring them any closer, that they wouldn't scare the birds away.
Somehow she knew that you didn't get many moments like this in your life: moments when you knew, without any doubt, that you were alive, when you felt the air in your lungs and the wet grass beneath your feet and the cotton on your skin; moments when you were completely in the present, when neither the past nor the future mattered.
She tried to slow her breathing, hoping somehow to make this moment last forever. ~ Neil Gaiman

I wish we could wash from our hearts and 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! ~ Louisa May Alcott

... when you feel that kind of all-consuming need for someone, a person you'd do fucking anything for, no matter what? They're in your fucking skin, in your soul, like the essence of who they are is imprinted on you so completely like the very air you breathe ... That's love. ~ Jasinda Wilder

Love Letter"

Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, then I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit.
You didn't just tow me an inch, no-
Nor leave me to set my small bald eye
Skyward again, without hope, of course,
Of apprehending blueness, or stars.

That wasn't it. I slept, say: a snake
Masked among black rocks as a black rock
In the white hiatus of winter-
Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure
In the million perfectly-chisled
Cheeks alighting each moment to melt
My cheeks of basalt. They turned to tears,
Angels weeping over dull natures,
But didn't convince me. Those tears froze.
Each dead head had a visor of ice.

And I slept on like a bent finger.
The first thing I was was sheer air
And the locked drops rising in dew
Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay
Dense and expressionless round about.
I didn't know what to make of it.
I shone, mice-scaled, and unfolded
To pour myself out like a fluid
Among bird feet and the stems of plants.
I wasn't fooled. I knew you at once.

Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.
My finger-length grew lucent as glass.
I started to bud like a March twig:
An arm and a leg, and arm, a leg.
From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
Now I resemble a sort of god
Floating through the air in my soul-shift
Sylvia Plath

I don't like the air," he said aloud. His voice was more serious than I'd ever heard it.

"Please be slightly less ambiguous," I sighed. ~ Kieran Wisser

Why don't you just hide in one of those pocket-realms for a bit?"
"It doesn't work like that. There's no air there." I gave him a look to say he should definitely do it then, and he laughed. ~ Sarah J. Maas

The Coming of Light
Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow's dust flares into breath. ~ Mark Strand