William Langewiesche Quotations

You should not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst.

The mastery of the turn is the story of how aviation became practical as a means of transportation. It is the story of how the world became small.

The site roared twenty-four hours a day for nine full months and beyond. From autumn through winter and into spring the crews labored in twelve-hour shifts, got some sleep, and came back for more. The enormous scale of their workplace is difficult to convey.

Nowhere can a person find greater solitude than alone in flight

Some think of Islam as an expedient jobs program that moves the female half of the population out of the way.

I sometimes still go out hunting for bad weather, flying low in simple airplanes to explore the inner reaches of the clouds. Less experienced pilots occasionally join me, not to learn formal lessons about weather flying, but with a more advanced purpose in mind - to accompany me in the slow accumulation of experience through circumstances that never repeat in a place that defies mastery.

So much of who we are is where we have been.

Mechanical wings allow us to fly, but it is with our minds that we make the sky ours

I ask people who don't fly, "How can you not fly when you live in a time in history when you can fly?"