Pilot's Wife Quotes

To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.

Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.

Don't have to see," the pilot grunted. "Olga knows the way." "Funny name for an aircraft," Grace commented. "Is it after your wife?" "My gun." Grace stared at him. "You named your plane after a gun?" "It was a very good gun.

To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.

But how do you ever know that you know a person?

I loved him," Muire said. "We were in love." As if that were enough.

Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

Odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love - soaked, drenched in love - only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined. Or weren't quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitable, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane.

And she thought then how strange it was that disaster—the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face—could be at times, such a thing of beauty.

The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky.

Night would settle in like slow blindness, sucking the color from the trees and the low sky and the rocks and the frozen grass and the frost white hydrangeas until there was nothing left in the window but her own reflection.

Who was this woman before me, her face imprinted with the expectations of others? I was Mom. I was Wife. I was Tragedy. I was Pilot. They all were me, and I, them. That was a fate we could not escape, we women; we would always be called upon by others in a way men simply never were. But weren't we always, first and foremost -- woman? Wasn't there strength in that, victory, clarity -- in all the stages of a woman's life?

But after a while, that too passes, and she and Jack go back to normal, as they have been before, which is to say that they, like all the other couples Kathryn has ever known, live in a state of gentle decline, of being infinitesimally, but not agonizingly, less than they were the day before.

I'd like to meet the pilot before we take off. Get his credentials and all. Maybe he's willing to take a bribe." "A bribe? Henry, if the plane crashes, he's going to be dead too. I'm pretty sure survival is more than enough incentive for him." "Maybe, but what if he has a massive gambling debt and needs the life insurance money to take care of his twelve children and handicapped wife?

for my father, 1922-1944 Your face did not rot like the others--the co-pilot, for example, I saw him yesterday. His face is corn- mush: his wife and daughter, the poor ignorant people, stare as if he will compose soon. He was more wronged than Job. But your face did not rot like the others--it grew dark, and hard like ebony; the features progressed in their distinction. If I could cajole you to come back for an evening, down from your compulsive orbiting, I would touch you, read your face as Dallas, your hoodlum gunner, now, with the blistered eyes, reads his braille editions. I would touch your face as a disinterested scholar touches an original page. However frightening, I would discover you, and I would not turn you in; I would not make you face your wife, or Dallas, or the co-pilot, Jim. You could return to your crazy orbiting, and I would not try to fully understand what it means to you. All I know is this: when I see you, as I have seen you at least once every year of my life, spin across the wilds of the sky like a tiny, African god, I feel dead. I feel as if I were the residue of a stranger's life, that I should pursue you. My head cocked toward the sky, I cannot get off the ground, and, you, passing over again, fast, perfect, and unwilling to tell me that you are doing well, or that it was mistake that placed you in that world, and me in this; or that misfortune placed these worlds in us.

No one was who they appeared to be in those days, mademoiselle. The Thierrys seemed to be collaborators, for example, so who would have thought that they were actually working with de Vogüé to undermine the Germans? At Piper-Heidsieck, the owners were hiding guns. At Krug, they were hiding pilots.” He tapped the base of Liv’s glass and added, “This champagne represents history, my dear. Heroism. Bravery. The people behind these wines helped save France.

I want to know what to do,” he hears himself say, and, like the decision to write to the co-pilot’s wife, the statement is a relief. He wants to know what to do. She taps the center of his hand. “That’s easy. The same thing we all must do. Take stock of who we are, and what we have, and then use it for good.

The warmth of him always, even on the coldest of nights, as though his inner furnace burned extravagantly.

He though continually about the apartment building, a Pandora’s Box whose thousand lids were one by one, inwardly opening. The dominant tenants of the high-rise, those who had adapted most successfully to life there, were not the unruly airline pilots and film technicians of the lower floors, nor the bad-tempered and aggressive wives of the tax specialists on the upper levels. Although at first sight these people appeared to provoke all the tension and hostility, the people really responsible were the quiet and self-contained residents, like the dental surgeons Steele and his wife.

I think you will like your life in the Transport Service, but it'll be far from normal. Being a slave ... or a goatherd's wife ... is closer to normal. A deep-space response ship pilot is a very, very rare thing.

Hey,” he says, arms still crossed forbiddingly. Maybe he can somehow sense I’ve seen his brother and sister. Maybe he’s got a secret love of antiquing and he saw the whole thing. “Hi,” I say, desperate to shake off this unnecessary guilt. “You’re home early.” As soon as it’s out of my mouth, I realize how weird it sounds. Home? He doesn’t live here. Early? I don’t know his regular schedule. I might as well be the one-dimensional wife in a bad TV pilot.

Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings. It looked like this: In Dwayne's part of the planet, anybody who wanted one could get one down at his local hardware store. Policemen all had them. So did the criminals. So did the people caught in between. Criminals would point guns at people and say, "Give me all your money," and the people usually would. And policemen would point their guns at criminals and say, "Stop" or whatever the situation called for, and the criminals usually would. Sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes a wife would get so mad at her husband that she would put a hole in him with a gun. Sometimes a husband would get so mad at his wife that he would put a hole in her. And so on. In the same week Dwayne Hoover ran amok, a fourteen-year-old Midland City boy put holes in his mother and father because he didn't want to show them the bad report card he had brought home. His lawyer planned to enter a plea of temporary insanity, which meant that at the time of the shooting the boy was unable to distinguish the difference between right and wrong. · Sometimes people would put holes in famous people so they could be at least fairly famous, too. Sometimes people would get on airplanes which were supposed to fly to someplace, and they would offer to put holes in the pilot and co-pilot unless they flew the airplane to someplace else.

When I got back to my billet I found my farmer at table with his wife and niece. “Tell me,” I said to him; “how many instruments do you think a pilot has to look after?” “How should I know? Not my trade,” he answered. “Must be some missing, though, to my way of thinking. The ones you win a war with. Have some supper?

As the years go by, he returns to this invisible world rather than to earth for peace and solace. There also he finds a profound enchantment, although he can seldom describe it. He can discuss it with others of his kind, and because they too know and feel its power they understand. But his attempts to communicate his feelings to his wife or other earthly confidants invariably end in failure. Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are willing victims to the spell. Their world is like a magic island in which the factors of life and death assume their proper values. Thinking becomes clear because there are no earthly foibles or embellishments to confuse it. Professional pilots are, of necessity, uncomplicated, simple men. Their thinking must remain straightforward, or they die—violently.

i’m very expressive. i deserve to feel pretty. i kissed the blarney stone. i am strong. i am brave. im a good friend. I’m a good sister. I’m a good wife. i am a good in-law. I’m a good daughter. i am a good niece. I’m a good beagle mother. i am a good granddaughter. i work hard for it, honey. im superfly TNT motherfucker. im a pilot of the airwaves. im a better third baseman that brooks robinson. I B-E-A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E. i have exceptionally beautiful feet, eyes, ears, hips, hair, teeth, breasts. and shoulders. and fingernails. in a different pen, she added, and eyelashes and eyebrows, plus in yet another pen, and nose. and chin.

The bold, black masked pup goes to a surgeon in Santa Barara with two young daughters. The surgeon’s wife, Jill, takes one look at the pup’s confident gait and names him “Brag.” He’s a handsome fellow with over-sized paws and a serious disposition. The official name for his coloring is sable, which means he has as much black on him as he does brown. Brag grows deeply attached to his new family, never straying far from the little girls and always with one eye on Jill, whom he adores. Before Brag is a year old, Jill’s husband – an amateur pilot – hops in his plain and flies to Bakersfield for business. On his way home later that night, with two friends seated behind him, he miscalculates his position and flies into a mountain north of Santa Barbara. The plan disintegrates on impact. No one survives

To my children, I was just Mom. That was all. And before that, I had been Charles’s wife, the bereaved mother of the slain child. That was all. But before that, I had been a pilot. An adventurer. I had broken records—but I had forgotten about them. I had steered aircraft—but I didn’t think I would know how to, anymore. I had soared across the sky, every bit as daring as Lucky Lindy himself, the one person in the world who could keep up with him. Yet motherhood had brought me down to earth with a thud, and kept me there with tentacles made of diapers and tears and lullabies and phone calls and car pools and the sticky residue of hair spray and Barbasol all over the bathroom counter. Would I ever be able to soar again? Would I ever have the courage? Did any woman? Or did we exist only as others saw us?

No matter how often Kathryn observed the phenomenon, she found it hard to comprehend: the way nothing could remain as it had been, not a house that was falling down, not a woman's face that had once been beautiful, not childhood, not a marriage, not love. You have to let this happen to you, he said quietly. It has its own momentum. But how do you ever know that you know a person? Aren't we enough? she asks again. Odd she thought, how a fact, seen one way, was one thing. And then, seen from a different angle, was something else entirely. Or perhaps not so odd. Of all people, he said, this should not have happened to you. She thought about the impossibility of ever knowing another person. About the fragility of the constructs people make. A marriage, for example. A family. To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

the greatest inspiration for institutional change in American law enforcement came on an airport tarmac in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 4, 1971. The United States was experiencing an epidemic of airline hijackings at the time; there were five in one three-day period in 1970. It was in that charged atmosphere that an unhinged man named George Giffe Jr. hijacked a chartered plane out of Nashville, Tennessee, planning to head to the Bahamas. By the time the incident was over, Giffe had murdered two hostages—his estranged wife and the pilot—and killed himself to boot. But this time the blame didn’t fall on the hijacker; instead, it fell squarely on the FBI. Two hostages had managed to convince Giffe to let them go on the tarmac in Jacksonville, where they’d stopped to refuel. But the agents had gotten impatient and shot out the engine. And that had pushed Giffe to the nuclear option. In fact, the blame placed on the FBI was so strong that when the pilot’s wife and Giffe’s daughter filed a wrongful death suit alleging FBI negligence, the courts agreed. In the landmark Downs v. United States decision of 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals wrote that “there was a better suited alternative to protecting the hostages’ well-being,” and said that the FBI had turned “what had been a successful ‘waiting game,’ during which two persons safely left the plane, into a ‘shooting match’ that left three persons dead.” The court concluded that “a reasonable attempt at negotiations must be made prior to a tactical intervention.” The Downs hijacking case came to epitomize everything not to do in a crisis situation, and inspired the development of today’s theories, training, and techniques for hostage negotiations. Soon after the Giffe tragedy, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) became the first police force in the country to put together a dedicated team of specialists to design a process and handle crisis negotiations. The FBI and others followed. A new era of negotiation had begun. HEART

In the shock of the moment, I gave some thought to renting a convertible and driving the twenty-seven hundred miles back alone. But then I realized I was neither single nor crazy. The acting director decided that, given the FBI’s continuing responsibility for my safety, the best course was to take me back on the plane I came on, with a security detail and a flight crew who had to return to Washington anyway. We got in the vehicle to head for the airport. News helicopters tracked our journey from the L.A. FBI office to the airport. As we rolled slowly in L.A. traffic, I looked to my right. In the car next to us, a man was driving while watching an aerial news feed of us on his mobile device. He turned, smiled at me through his open window, and gave me a thumbs-up. I’m not sure how he was holding the wheel. As we always did, we pulled onto the airport tarmac with a police escort and stopped at the stairs of the FBI plane. My usual practice was to go thank the officers who had escorted us, but I was so numb and distracted that I almost forgot to do it. My special assistant, Josh Campbell, as he often did, saw what I couldn’t. He nudged me and told me to go thank the cops. I did, shaking each hand, and then bounded up the airplane stairs. I couldn’t look at the pilots or my security team for fear that I might get emotional. They were quiet. The helicopters then broadcast our plane’s taxi and takeoff. Those images were all over the news. President Trump, who apparently watches quite a bit of TV at the White House, saw those images of me thanking the cops and flying away. They infuriated him. Early the next morning, he called McCabe and told him he wanted an investigation into how I had been allowed to use the FBI plane to return from California. McCabe replied that he could look into how I had been allowed to fly back to Washington, but that he didn’t need to. He had authorized it, McCabe told the president. The plane had to come back, the security detail had to come back, and the FBI was obligated to return me safely. The president exploded. He ordered that I was not to be allowed back on FBI property again, ever. My former staff boxed up my belongings as if I had died and delivered them to my home. The order kept me from seeing and offering some measure of closure to the people of the FBI, with whom I had become very close. Trump had done a lot of yelling during the campaign about McCabe and his former candidate wife. He had been fixated on it ever since. Still in a fury at McCabe, Trump then asked him, “Your wife lost her election in Virginia, didn’t she?” “Yes, she did,” Andy replied. The president of the United States then said to the acting director of the FBI, “Ask her how it feels to be a loser” and hung up the phone.

And Burpee, the Canadian? His English wife about to have a baby. His father who kept a large store in Ottawa. He was not coming back because they had got him, too. They had got him somewhere between Hamm and the target. Burpee, slow of speech and slow of movement, but a good pilot. He was Terry’s countryman, and so were his crew. I like their ways and manners, their free-and-easy outlook, their openness. I was going to miss them a lot

Well, how's that going to work with both of you as pilots? Who's going to watch your kids? What if you both get deployed? If he is going to be successful in the Air Force, he'll need a strong support system at home. Don't you want to be a good wife to him?" My heart sank. It was absolutely none of his business that we were going to get a divorce anyway. None of this was any of his business. It was clearly not his place to be making that kind of decision for my family, or anyone's family.

It may have been derivative, lighthearted fluff but Once Upon a Dead Man also seemed like the ideal vehicle to help facilitate Rock Hudson’s transition from movie to television star (even if he dismissively referred to the tube as “illustrated radio”). The much-publicized two-hour movie would serve as the pilot for a new NBC series called McMillan & Wife.

To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.” ― Anita Shreve, The Pilot's Wife

At one point when I was in the middle of the first season, I asked myself why I would want to watch a conservative Democrat destroy teachers’ unions and have joyless sex with a woman who looks like a very young teenager. I still had not answered the question when Claire pushed things to the next level in a scene so intensely creepy that it might count as the most revolting thing I have ever witnessed on television. A longtime member of the couple’s Secret Service security detail is dying of cancer, and Claire goes to visit him alone. On his deathbed, he reveals that he was always secretly in love with her and thought that Frank wasn’t good enough for her. Her response is almost incomprehensible in its cruelty—she mocks and taunts him for thinking he could ever attain a woman like her, and then puts her hand down his pants and begins to give him a handjob, all the while saying, in true perverse style, “This is what you wanted, right?” Surely Claire doesn’t have to emotionally destroy a man who is dying of cancer—and yet perhaps in a way she does, because she uses it as a way of convincing herself that Frank really is the right man for her. Not only could an average, hardworking, sentimental man never satisfy her, but she would destroy him. By contrast, Frank not only can take her abuse, but actively thrives on it, as she does on his. Few images of marriage as a true partnership of equals are as convincing as this constant power struggle between two perverse creeps. Claire is not the first wife in the “high-quality TV drama” genre to administer a humiliating handjob. In fact, she is not even the first wife to administer a humiliating handjob to a man who is dying of cancer. That distinction belongs to Skyler White of Breaking Bad, who does the honors in the show’s pilot. It is intended as a birthday treat for her husband Walt, who is presumably sexually deprived due to his wife’s advanced pregnancy, and so in contrast to Claire’s, it would count as a generous gesture if not for the fact that Skyler continues to work on her laptop the entire time, barely even acknowledging Walt’s presence in the room. In her own way, Skyler is performing her dominance just as much as Claire was with her cancer patient, but Skyler’s detachment from the act makes it somehow even creepier than Claire’s.

:-I'd like to meet the pilot before we take off. Get his credentials and all. Maybe he's willing to take a bribe. -A bribe? Henry, if the plane crashes, he's going to be dead too. I'm pretty sure survival is more than enough incentive for him. -Maybe, but what if he has a massive gambling debt and needs the life insurance money to take care of his twelve children and handicapped wife?

To my children, I was just Mom. That was all. And before that, I had been Charles’s wife, the bereaved mother of the slain child. That was all. But before that, I had been a pilot. An adventurer. I had broken records—but I had forgotten about them. I had steered aircraft—but I didn’t think I would know how to, anymore. I had soared across the sky, every bit as daring as Lucky Lindy himself, the one person in the world who could keep up with him. Yet motherhood had brought me down to earth with a thud, and kept me there with tentacles made of diapers and tears and lullabies and phone calls and car pools and the sticky residue of hair spray and Barbasol all over the bathroom counter. Would I ever be able to soar again?

her skin, which she has hardly

While I was in the partisan unit, I received a letter from my husband by some miracle. This was such a joy, so unexpected, because for two years I had heard nothing from him. And then a plane dropped some food, ammunition…And the mail…And in the mail, in this canvas bag, there was a letter—for me. Then I wrote a letter to the Central Committee. I wrote that I would do anything so long as my husband and I were together. We waited for the plane, it was nighttime and pitch-dark. And some sort of plane was circling over us, and then it dumped bombs on us. It was a Messerschmitt. The German had spotted our camp and circled back again. And at the same time our plane, a U-2, arrived and landed just by the fir tree where I was standing. The pilot barely landed and immediately began to take off again, because he saw that the German was circling back and would start shooting again. I took hold of the wing and shouted, “I must go to Moscow, I have permission.” He even swore: “Get in!” And we flew together, just the two of us. I figured out from the postal code where my husband was fighting... They said, “You know, it’s very dangerous where your husband is…” I sat there and wept, so he took pity on me and gave me the pass. “Go out to the highway,” he said. “There’ll be a traffic controller, he’ll tell you how to go.” I arrive at the unit, everybody’s surprised, “Who are you?” they ask. I couldn’t say I was a wife. I tell them—his sister. “Wait,” they tell me, “it’s a four-mile walk to the trenches.” They told him that his sister had arrived. What sister? They say, “The redhead.” His sister had black hair. So he figured out at once what sister. I don’t know how he managed to crawl out of there, but he came soon, and he and I met. What joy… Suddenly I see the superiors coming to the dugout: the major, the colonel. Everybody shakes my hand. Then we sat down and drank, and each of them said something about a wife finding her husband in the trenches. That’s a real wife! The next day my husband was wounded, badly wounded. We ran together, we waded together through some swamp, we crawled together. The machine guns kept rattling, and we kept crawling, and he got wounded in the hip. With an exploding bullet, and try bandaging that—it was in the buttock. It was all torn open, and mud and dirt all over. We were encircled and tried to break out. There was nowhere to take the wounded, and there were no medications. When we did break through, I took my husband to the hospital. I buried him on January 1, and thirty-eight days later I gave birth to a son.

Sandy continually worries about me serving in Vietnam. She fears for me and is always asking herself, Will he be alright? Will he get wounded? Will he get captured? Will he be killed, and I’ll lose another husband? These haunting questions shouldn't be on the mind of any wife for a day, let alone an entire year of their life.

If he had not needed his wife to help him pilot the Humbug, he would have kicked them both overboard months ago.

You are an inspiration, Teresa, in so many ways. Somehow you balance it all—being a soldier, a Black Hawk helicopter pilot, a wife, and a mother—and you do it with grace and courage. You are truly an example of everything that is right with our country.

Es decir, ellos, como todas las otras parejas que ha conocido, viven en un estado de suave declive, de convertirse, de modo sutil y sin torturas, cada día en algo menos de lo que eran el día anterior.

From the Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker Behind “The Exciting Story of Cuba” It was on a rainy evening in January of 2013, after Captain Hank and his wife Ursula returned by ship from a cruise in the Mediterranean, that Captain Hank was pondering on how to market his book, Seawater One. Some years prior he had published the book “Suppressed I Rise.” But lacking a good marketing plan the book floundered. Locally it was well received and the newspapers gave it great reviews, but Ursula was battling allergies and, unfortunately, the timing was off, as was the economy. Captain Hank has the ability to see sunshine when it’s raining and he’s not one easily deterred. Perhaps the timing was off for a novel or a textbook, like the Scramble Book he wrote years before computers made the scene. The history of West Africa was an option, however such a book would have limited public interest and besides, he had written a section regarding this topic for the second Seawater book. No, what he was embarking on would have to be steeped in history and be intertwined with true-life adventures that people could identify with. Out of the blue, his friend Jorge suggested that he write about Cuba. “You were there prior to the Revolution when Fidel Castro was in jail,” he ventured. Laughing, Captain Hank told a story of Mardi Gras in Havana. “Half of the Miami Police Department was there and the Coca-Cola cost more than the rum. Havana was one hell of a place!” Hank said. “I’ll tell you what I could do. I could write a pamphlet about the history of the island. It doesn’t have to be very long… 25 to 30 pages would do it.” His idea was to test the waters for public interest and then later add it to his book Seawater One. Writing is a passion surpassed only by his love for telling stories. It is true that Captain Hank had visited Cuba prior to the Revolution, but back then he was interested more in the beauty of the Latino girls than the history or politics of the country. “You don’t have to be Greek to appreciate Greek history,” Hank once said. “History is not owned solely by historians. It is a part of everyone’s heritage.” And so it was that he started to write about Cuba. When asked about why he wasn’t footnoting his work, he replied that the pamphlet, which grew into a book over 600 pages long, was a book for the people. “I’m not writing this to be a history book or an academic paper. I’m writing this book, so that by knowing Cuba’s past, people would understand it’s present.” He added that unless you lived it, you got it from somewhere else anyway, and footnoting just identifies where it came from. Aside from having been a ship’s captain and harbor pilot, Captain Hank was a high school math and science teacher and was once awarded the status of “Teacher of the Month” by the Connecticut State Board of Education. He has done extensive graduate work, was a union leader and the attendance officer at a vocational technical school. He was also an officer in the Naval Reserve and an officer in the U.S. Army for a total of over 40 years. He once said that “Life is to be lived,” and he certainly has. Active with Military Intelligence he returned to Europe, and when I asked what he did there, he jokingly said that if he had told me he would have to kill me. The Exciting Story of Cuba has the exhilaration of a novel. It is packed full of interesting details and, with the normalizing of the United States and Cuba, it belongs on everyone’s bookshelf, or at least in the bathroom if that’s where you do your reading. Captain Hank is not someone you can hold down and after having read a Proof Copy I know that it will be universally received as the book to go to, if you want to know anything about Cuba! Excerpts from a conversation with Chief Warrant Officer Peter Rommel, USA Retired, Military Intelligence Corps, Winter of 2014.

All day this strange pilot had flown his antique aeroplane over the abandoned space centre, a frantic machine lost in the silence of Florida. The flapping engine of the old Curtiss biplane woke Dr Mallory soon after dawn, as he lay asleep beside his exhausted wife on the fifth floor of the empty hotel in Titusville. Dreams of the space age had filled the night, memories of white runways as calm as glaciers, now broken by this eccentric aircraft veering around like the fragment of a disturbed mind.

Don’t have to see,” the pilot grunted. “Olga knows the way.” “Funny name for an aircraft,” Grace commented. “Is it after your wife?” “My gun.” Grace stared at him. “You named your plane after a gun?” “It was very good gun.

and I have seen them all, stars such as John Wayne (Jet Pilot with Janet Leigh), or George C. Scott (Not With My Wife, You Don't with Virna Lisi), or William Holden (The Bridges at Toko-Ri with Grace Kelly) all fly with their visors up and their oxygen masks dangling loose. I assume this is to let the cameras record them acting. No real pilot flies like that. Without a visor, the high altitude glare would blind me and

Malcolm pours a scotch, takes a slug, deposits the tumbler on the coffee table. Then he reconsiders, finds a coaster, even though the liquid is room-temperature and the table is glass, and there's no possibility of condensation damage. But Allison is a coaster fanatic, and he doesn't need to go out of his way to drive his wife nuts; she's more than capable of piloting herself to that destination all on her own.

And before that, I had been Charles’s wife, the bereaved mother of the slain child. That was all. But before that, I had been a pilot. An adventurer. I had broken records—but I had forgotten about them. I had steered aircraft—but I didn’t think I would know how to, anymore. I had soared across the sky, every bit as daring as Lucky Lindy himself, the one person in the world who could keep up with him. Yet motherhood had brought me down to earth with a thud, and kept me there with tentacles made of diapers and tears and lullabies and phone calls and car pools and the sticky residue of hair spray and Barbasol all over the bathroom counter. Would I ever be able to soar again?

Dolly’d given him a white silk scarf as a parting present. He didn’t know how she’d managed the money for it and she wouldn’t let him ask, just settled it round his neck inside his flight jacket. Somebody’d told her the Spitfire pilots all wore them, to save the constant collar chafing, and she meant him to have one. It felt nice, he’d admit that. Made him think of her touch when she’d put it on him. He pushed the thought hastily aside; the last thing he could afford to do was start thinking about his wife, if he ever hoped to get back to her. And he did mean to get back to her. Where

Who was this woman before me, her face imprinted with the expectations of others? I was Mom. I was Wife. I was Tragedy. I was Pilot. They all were me, and I, them. That was a fate we could not escape, we women; we would always be called upon by others in a way men simply never were. But weren’t we always, first and foremost—woman? Wasn’t there strength in that, victory, clarity—in all the stages of a woman’s life? The Shells. That was the first title I imagined for a series of essays, the ideas of which I had had, in the back of my mind, for a few years now. I had played with the idea of comparing the stages of a woman’s life with different shells; the Moon shell, the Double Sunrise, the Argonauta, a few others. Each perfect, each different, each serving

You came into my life when I didn’t want you there. You sprayed me with water, were living in my house, and stole my heart when it wasn’t even whole yet.” She gave him a wobbly smile, and Dawson squeezed her hands. “You gave me time when I needed it. Love when it was hard to give. Comfort when I pushed you away. I love you for all of that, and for being the man that you are. I promise to love, cherish, and honor you forever.” She glanced out at the small crowd and back at him. “And I really can’t wait to be your wife.

In the diegesis of Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, 1942, the Polish actor Josef Tura is each time interrupted by the disruptive departure of an audience member at the moment when he declaims on stage Hamlet's "to be, or not to be--that is the question." We quickly discover that this line that begins Hamlet's soliloquy is the coded signal for the pilot infatuated with Tura's wife to meet her backstage. But maybe the more basic reason Tura is recurrently interrupted at that point is that "to be, or not to be" is not the question; the question is rather the one that theater artist Romeo Castellucci poses in and apropos of his Amleto, 1992: to be and not to be. Indeed soon enough Tura, who is now impersonating the Nazi collaborator Professor Alexander Siletsky, is ushered by the Gestapo into a room where the corpse of the "real," murdered spy Siletsky is seated: Tura is thus intimately implicated in a situation where someone is in both states of being and non-being, is and is not.

She wondered, and not for the first time, if a woman could forgive a man who'd betrayed her. And if she did, was that an affirmation? Or was it merely foolishness?

A dedicated adulterer causes no suspicion, she realized, because he truly does not want to be caught.

I like watching people mend," he said. "Do they? Mend?" she asked. "Given enough time, the women usually do.

Classification and then reduction, the mind’s strongest weapon against conscience, if it wants to relieve your conscience to kill innocents, it would classify them within a group and include with them those who deserve death in its view, then reduce all the small details into generalities, and ignore them. As it will not fail a trick, to make the killing of children and women an inevitable necessity, towards a higher goal and a better world. Thus began the story of Baibars himself, nearly twenty years ago, when the extremist organization decided to classify the entire American people as one group, ignoring that the number of Muslims killed by Muslims themselves was many times greater than those killed because of American policies in the Middle East, and then decided that the destruction of their opponents in the Middle East. The destruction of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Their minds reduced all the details; a child playing in his father’s office, a girl waiting for her mother’s return, a wife on the plane eager to meet her husband, their conscience did not hesitate for a moment to kill thousands of innocent people, for the sake of their ultimate goal. And so did America itself, when it decided to avenge its murderers, categorized, reduced, and shot everyone. Its pilots saw neither the children nor the families in the homes they were about to demolish over their heads. So did Hitler, Napoleon, Hulagu, and every serial killer known to mankind. It makes you like a pilot driving a plane, throwing a bomb over the houses, not seeing the trace of what it did on the ground, and if he carried it with his hand and walked in the streets, and watched the children, women, the innocent, who would fall dead from this bomb, he would not detonate it, but he only sees houses that look like matchboxes from the sky, general picture, no details. Satan’s most powerful weapon for controlling the mind, or the most powerful weapon of the mind to control us, and at some point, it masters it, to the point where it no longer needs to justify, reduce, or categorize anything, kill your opponents, and all their offspring, destroy them, burn them, leave none of them. Since many minds are tools in the hands of Satan, it can manipulate them as it wants. Since its working mechanisms have become known to him, Baibars decided, why not? Why do not we make them tools for good. He used Satan’s own style, manipulated everyone, and at times, reduced, but according to his laws, do not reduce the innocent. He is not afraid, he made his decision in the war, and whoever made this decision must bear the consequences of it. He wished time would go back a thousand or two thousand years and freeze there, where the wars between human beings were fought with swords and arrows, at that time, not many innocents fell, only soldiers who made their decision in advance to war, to kill, knowing that they might die. Everyone had the time and the ability to think, make decisions, and even escape. While today, most of the victims of wars do not make a decision, they pay with their lives without anyone asking them if they want to be part of this war at all. Cities are bombed and destroyed over the heads of their inhabitants, and most of them reject this war from the beginning. When someone detonates a bomb in a mall, he does not ask the victims of his bombing about their political stances, their religion, and even if they want to be part of this war, and so do the planes, they do not ask, and their victims have no opportunity to make a decision. As for him, Baibars, he made up his mind It is to fight in defense of those who did not have the opportunity to take it.

Night would settle in like slow blindness,

When the pilot told them they were clear to unbuckle, Blake turned to Samantha. “Ready to get married?” She turned her hand over and laced her fingers with his. “What the hell, I didn’t have anything better planned for today.” Blake tossed his head back and laughed.

The Pilot’s Wife Anita Shreve

Stories from Beyond the Sea – “I could not believe my good luck!” from Page 31 “Not only was she stunningly beautiful but she was also witty, flirtatious and at the same time understanding and loving, I couldn’t believe my good fortune and did all I could to convince her to stay with me in the United States. After getting married to my young wife Ursula, in a small town in upstate New York, and thinking that the US Navy would be a better option than returning to a life at sea on merchant ships, I took the navy exam to become a student pilot. As a commissioned officer with the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade (LTJR) I enjoyed many benefits that the aviation cadets didn’t get, including having basic living quarters. Having had some prior experience flying the right hand seat in a DC-3 when I was in Liberia, I took to aviation, my new endeavor, like a duck to water.

Who was this woman before me, her face imprinted with the expectations of others? I was Mom. I was Wife. I was Tragedy. I was Pilot. They all were me, and I them. That was the fate we could not escape, we women; we would always be called upon by others in a way men simply never were. But weren't we always, first and foremost -- woman? Wasn't there strength in that, victory, clarity -- in all the stages of a woman's life?

How quickly the mind accommodated itself, she thought, even in such tiny increments. Perhaps it was that after a series of shocks, the body acclimated itself, like being inoculated — each subsequent shock delivering less impact. Or possibly this momentarily benumbed state was only a lull — a cease-fire. How would she know? There had never been a rehearsal for any of this.

(Are you squiffy?

He’ll ruin us all,” Mr. Edwards says with feeling. From prior conversations, Sydney knows he is referring to the president of the United States.

It will be your generation who will suffer,” the older man says, his anger apparently not having been forgotten after all. “You’ll be decades extricating yourself from this mess. Monstrous debt. Terrorists. Abysmal foreign policy.” The table ponders the future, which does indeed look grim.

Take a flashlight,” Mr. Edwards says. Ben holds aloft a Maglite heavy enough to kill a man.

She wondered as she drove why she had never imagined an affair. How could a woman live with a man all that time and never suspect? It seemed, at the very least, a monumental act of naïveté, of oblivion. But then she thought she knew the answer even as she asked the question: A dedicated adulterer causes no suspicion, she realized, because he truly does not want to be caught.

Are you Jewish?” she asked as she was showing Sydney to her room. It wasn’t clear to Sydney which answer Mrs. Edwards would have preferred: Jewish being more interesting; not Jewish being more acceptable.

She’ll find a man,” Jeff announces. “She’ll be all right.” Sydney is taken aback. Though, possibly, in Julie’s case, an independent life is not a reasonable expectation. “I think the man will find her,” Sydney corrects.

I’m not sure I’ve ever met a man capable of going weeks without once mentioning his profession.” “You could know my father two years and he wouldn’t tell you if you didn’t ask.” “Unusual these days, when a man is often measured by what he does, by how successful he is.

I did like the idea that my life was based on asking questions. And finding answers to those questions. I suppose I believe that being wise is more important in the long run than having a lot of money.” Sydney laughs. “Which is good because I’m never going to have any.

I think some part of her was afraid of me,” he says, “afraid that I would want to live in Naples.” “Would you have done that?” she asks. “Not if she didn’t want to. I don’t think she ever understood the power she had over me.” “Does she still? Have that power?” “Oh, yes,” he answers, smiling.

There is a moment, recognizable to each of them, when she might linger and change everything entirely. But she lets herself out of the car. She doesn’t look back as she walks toward the hotel door.

When she thinks about entering into a relationship with such a man, however, she feels only fear—a fear similar to, yet not as intense as, the fear of living her life alone.

The mustache bother you?” Tsomides asks from his end of the table. “We Greeks like our women with mustaches.

No, Honora is the more alluring of the two. And if he hadn’t been so drunk these last two nights, he might have done something about it.

He put his hand under her skirt, and it would not have mattered to anyone except McDermott and herself. She digs her toes deep into the wet sand as she walks. She said to McDermott, I wish.

she was alone in her house, and all she could do was wander from room to room, looking out the windows and replaying the few moments at the roadhouse and at the kitchen table over and over and over until she had extracted from them every possible nugget of meaning. At the time, it seemed to take place before her mind could comprehend what was happening, though it was clear her body knew immediately, and she thinks it is astonishing the way the body can respond all on its own, without the mind quite keeping up.

He thinks about what happened earlier on the wet grass. The way her skin felt under his hand. In his mind, he goes over the kisses again. Were there two or three? The sound she made at the back of her throat. He knows he will remember the precise sound of that moan all his life, that he will have to listen to it again and again — a record on a turntable.

A feeling of panic rises within her. “Last night,” he says, “on the grass, I wanted to make love to you. I wanted it so bad I thought I would do almost anything to make it happen.” She closes her eyes. She releases a hand, and he seizes it. “You were afraid,” he says. She shakes her head no. “Yes,” she says. He kisses the inside of her wrist. “I think that’s it,” he says.

Beside her, Sexton sleeps in his guileless pose, his arms thrown up behind his head, looking exposed and vulnerable and content, and for a moment Honora has a dreamy and irrational desire to lay something heavy on his throat and crush his windpipe.

Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Capitalist owns textile company and makes huge amount of money and lives across the river in big house with Frigidaire and GE washing machine and Packard and Chris-Craft motor yacht while employing hundreds of workers to whom he pays pitiful wages, all the while thinking it perfectly normal that they should live in hideously filthy tenements with no running water and no indoor plumbing and not enough money to feed their children. How am I doing so far?

Management has pared wages down to next to nothing, McDermott reads, and he thinks of fingernails scraping a cement wall as they go down. The bosses live in high style on the other side of the river. McDermott can see the massive houses from the mill yard — poor planning on someone’s part, he thinks. No hint of an economic depression over there. Not with all their power lawn mowers and swimming pools and fancy automobiles. In fact, it’s possible the bosses are doing better than ever now. Money goes farther these days: gardeners and cooks and chauffeurs come dirt cheap.

She had violent red hair and the clearest skin he has ever seen.

And then said capitalist decides for whatever reason,” Vivian continues, “— perhaps his business is not doing well, perhaps he wants a trip to Havana — to cut his workers’ pay ten percent so as to increase profits for himself. And, mirabile dictu, the workers mind!” Mironson says nothing, but Honora can see a small twitch at the side of his mouth. “Uppity workers,” Vivian says, exhaling a long plume of blue smoke.

The tension in the room reminds Honora of the aftermath of a thunderclap: full of sound and yet intensely silent.

Hell, no,” he says. “A good Irish Catholic like me? No, I’m loyal to the union, not the Reds.

Of course, he is a handsome man, but there is something a bit . . . well . . . oily about him that is somewhat off-putting, at least to Vivian. He seems too eager to please, yet hardly to notice when Honora is in the room.

He’s adorable. A saint, really. I’ve no experience with selfless men. They’re remarkably unsexy, don’t you think?

Hesitation is death. A racecar driver doesn't have the liberty of thinking about the next turn for a week or so. They need to act or die. A fighter jet pilot can't "think about things" when a bomb is heading their way, they need to act immediately and trust themselves to do the right thing, with their life being at actual stake. An athlete can't stop mid-run to ask their wife if it's okay that they cross the finish line. They need to run like hell just set their feet on fire. A CEO does not have the right to hesitate or ponder on things for days on end. You either do it or you don't, and if there's no impulse to act to the left or to the right, you are probably not a natural born decisionmaker. Slow decisionmakers don't belong in top management. High performance people make high performance decisions at high speeds, they trust themselves, and they act.

As he wavered, Allen ordered intensive work on a “snatch” operation in which Pope would be plucked from his prison—it was actually loose house arrest—by a low-flying aircraft. This proved unnecessary. Sukarno, who admitted that “when it comes to women I am weak,” received Pope’s wife and sister and could not resist their tears. He pardoned the pilot with a private message: “Lose yourself in the USA secretly. Don’t show yourself publicly. Don’t give out news stories. Don’t issue statements. Just go home, hide yourself, get lost, and we’ll forget the whole thing.