#plane

There is only one reason I did not go down in flames over the Angers, and that is because I knew I had Julie in the back. Would never have had the presence of mind to put that fire out if I hadn't been trying to save her life. ↗

— Elizabeth Wein

#plane #anger

And like no other sculpture in the history of art, the dead engine and dead airframe come to life at the touch of a human hand, and join their life with the pilot's own. ↗

— Richard Bach

#airplanes #aviation #flying #pilot #art

A breeze blows up, touching my cheek like a little child's kiss. It flutters a piece of paper. "Trash, out there? Must belong to one of us." We move closer, and when I reached for it, I find...... a perfect paper airplane. ↗

— Ellen Hopkins

#death #ending #kiss #paper #death

War," Beranabus murmurs, face crinkling. "Most humans know nothing of true warfare. They wage their silly territorial battles, kill each other ruthlessly and freely, and consider themselves experts on war and suffering. But the real war has always been ahead of them, unseen, unimagined. Enemies who can't be killed by normal weapons, who have their base in an alternate universe, who are interested only in slaughtering every living being on the face of the planet. ↗

— Darren Shan

#death #demons #planet #war #death

The cattle crouched round them in soft shadowy clumps, placidly munching, and dreaming with wide-open eyes. The narrow zone of colour created by the firelight was like the planet Earth - a little freak of brightness in a universe of impenetrable shadows ↗

— Hope Mirrlees

#cows #dreaming #impenetrable-shadows #planet-earth #the-universe

Planetary exploration satisfies our inclination for great enterprises and wanderings and quests that has been with us since our days as hunters and gatherers on the East African savannahs a million years ago. By chance—it is possible, I say, to imagine many skeins of historical causality in which this would not have transpired—in our age we are able to begin again. Exploring other worlds employs precisely the same qualities of daring, planning, cooperative enterprise, and valor that mark the finest in military tradition. Never mind the night launch of an Apollo spacecraft bound for another world. That makes the conclusion foregone. Witness mere F-14s taking off from adjacent flight decks, gracefully canting left and right, afterburners flaming, and there’s something that sweeps you away—or at least it does me. And no amount of knowledge of the potential abuses of carrier task forces can affect the depth of that feeling. It simply speaks to another part of me. It doesn’t want recriminations or politics. It just wants to fly. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#planetary-exploration #age

If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane. ↗

— Henry Billings Brown

#constitution #inferior #other #plane #put

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat. ↗

— John le Carre

#become #cheat #childhood #detachment #ever

Pluto will always be a planet in my book. That’s because my book was published before Pluto was blacklisted by planetary scientists.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#planet #pluto #published #science #scientists

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#america #bombs #communism #communists #vietnam