Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead.

Thousands of volumes have been written about aviation, but we do not automatically have thousands of true and special friends in their authors. That rare writer who comes alive on a page does it by giving of himself, by writing of meanings, and not just of fact or of things that have happened to him. The writers of flight who have done this are usually found together in a special section on private bookshelves.

There's this wonderful and very important event when we're born, and we forget everything that's gone before, or else we'd be such a mass of rememberings that we couldn't operate successfully on this planet.

Without my airplane I am an ordinary man, and a useless one - a trainer without a horse, a sculptor without marble, a priest without a god. Without an airplane I am a lonely consumer of hamburgers.

You choose, you live the consequences. Every yes, no, maybe, creates the school you call your personal experience.

Pain and adversity are powerful vehicles to promote personal growth. Nothing helps you learn, grow, and evolve more quickly. Nothing offers you as big an opportunity to reclaim more of your authentic power as a person.

He moves not through distance, but through the ranges of satisfaction that come from hauling himself up into the air with complete and utter control; from knowing himself and knowing his airplane so well that he can come somewhere close to touching, in his own special and solitary way, that thing that is called perfection.