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.

The highest art form of all is a human being in control of himself and his airplane in flight, urging the spirit of a machine to match his own.

We love action and adventure, but we use it to go out and start wars and kill people.

Reality lies far beyond space and time, and I need to know why.

The only thing that matters, at the end of a stay on earth, is how well did we love, what was the quality of our love?

don't you think between here and now we will see each other once or twice?

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.