Plane Crash Quotes

If the black box flight recorder is never damaged during a plane crash, why isn’t the whole airplane made out of that stuff?

I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

A heart weighs more when it splits in two; it crashes in the chest like a broken plane.

Yes, Minister, it turns out that there was a mysterious force that caused that plane to crash. We call it gravity.

Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty-- and every other moment from the beginning of the world--is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don't let yourself believe it will happen to you.

No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.

I wouldn't mind dying in a plane crash. It'd be a good way to go. I don't want to die in my sleep, or of old age, or OD... I want to feel what it's like. I want to taste it, hear it, smell it. Death is only going to happen to you once; I don't want to miss it

But choosing to lovingly care for her was like steering a plane into a mountain as gently as possible. The crash is imminent; it's how you spend your time on the way down that counts.

On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I'd later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.

I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn’t see any way to change things. Only end them.

Over the last several decades, extreme poverty, victims of war, child mortality, crime, famine, child labour, deaths in natural disasters and the number of plane crashes have all plummeted. We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever. So why don’t we realise this? It’s simple. Because the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is – be it a terrorist attack, violent uprising, or natural disaster – the bigger its newsworthiness.

When you invent the car, you also invent the car accident. When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash.

Simple. Keep it simple. I am Brian Robeson. I have been in a plane crash. I am going to find some food. I am going to find some berries. He

I hope that your plane crashes over the ocean and piranhas eat your balls. It was lovely meeting you, you self-righteous egoistical son of a bitch. I can see where Joey gets his psychotic behavior.

That’s the point. This healthy-feeling time now just feels like a tease. Like I’m in this holding pattern, flying in smooth circles within sight of the airport, in super-comfortable first class. But I can’t enjoy the in-flight movie or free chocolate chip cookies because I know that before the airport is able to make room for us, the plane is going to run out of fuel, and we’re going to crash-land into a fiery, agonizing death.

When the plane went down in San Francisco, I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes. He memorizes the wrecked metal details, the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke. Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes: The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa. How people go on, and how people don’t. It was almost a year before I learned that his brother was a pilot. I can’t help it, I love the way men love.

I don't know. Maybe we're all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we're scared shitless of explosive change. But we're fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes to ogle the mutilation and mangled metal on the side of the interstate, and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash into skyscrapers, breached levees drown a city, and CNN and the networks rush to the scene so that we can all sit in front of our TVs and feast on the footage. Stare, stunned, at the pandemonium--the devils let loose from their cages.

You'll figure it out! You get on your plane and I'll get on mine. And we'll see which one crashes!

Simple. Keep it simple. I am Brian Robeson. I have been in a plane crash. I am going to find some food. I am going to find some berries.

They're both a bit cavalier about the whole thing at first; more than anything, they seem to think that it's going to be a lot of fun. Which it is, of course, but mostly in the way a plane crash is fun to reminisce about after you survive it.

when you’re sitting on a plane 40, 000 feet up in the air, looking out the window, dreaming of your future and how bright it appears to be, or maybe just watching the drops of rain being pushed into different designs from the force of air at 400 mph, well, life feels good. it feels safe, your seat belt is on and your feet are up. then the oxygen masks fall, the plane jumps, snaps and jolts. people start to scream, babies burst out crying, people start praying all in time to the overhead announcement that we’re gonna crash. right then, as your life flashes before your eyes, you hear yourself say, “god, if you get me outta this one, i’ll stop [insert lie here] forever.” right then the nose of the plane pulls up and the captain says, “wow, that was a close one, folks. we’re ok, we’ll be landing in thirty minutes and we’re all safe and sound, sorry for the scare…” that’s how getting hooked on junk is, and when the kick is over you can’t believe you ever got on that plane in the first place. the question is, will you ever fly again?

Many a survivor of a plane crash who is or was against cannibalism and had never eaten human flesh once found themselves in a situation where they had to either eat human flesh, or go the way of all flesh.

She hated using airplane toilets. She was always afraid the plane would choose the exact moment she was most defenseless to crash, and she'd spend her final seconds of life spiraling toward earth with her bottom bare to the world.

We live in a society and a culture and an economic model that tries to make everything look right. Look at computers. Why are they all putty-colored or off-fucking-white? You make something off-white or beige because you are afraid to use any other color – because you don’t want to offend anybody. But by definition, when you make something no one hates, no one loves it. So I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That’s what we really pay attention to anyway. We don’t talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing.

The flights were hijacked, the planes crashed into buildings, 2,977 people died, and the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers.

A heart weighs more when it splits in two; it crashes in the chest like a broken plane. Sarah dragged her wreckage back to the house up to her bedroom, and down into a deep, dark hole.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation.

She said, “Do you see how I’m wearing this apron? It means I’m working. For a living.” The unconcerned expression didn’t flag. He said, “I’ll take care of it.” She echoed, “Take care of it?” “Yeah. How much do you make in an hour? I’ll take care of it. And I’ll talk to your manager.” For a moment, Blue was actually lost for words. She had never believed people who claimed to be speechless, but she was. She opened her mouth, and at first, all that came out was air. Then something like the beginning of a laugh. Then finally, she managed to sputter, “I am not a prostitute.” The Aglionby boy appeared puzzled for a long moment, and then realization dawned. “Oh, that was not how I meant it. That is not what I said.” “That is what you said! You think you can just pay me to talk to your friend? Clearly you pay most of your female companions by the hour and don’t know how it works with the real world, but . . . but . . .” Blue remembered that she was working to a point, but now what that point was. Indignation had eliminated all higher functions and all that remained was the desire to slap him. The boy opened his mouth to protest, and her thought came back to her all in a rush. “Most girls, when they’re interested in a guy, will sit with them for free.” To his credit, the Aglionby boy didn’t speak right away. Instead, he thought for a moment and then he said, without heat, “You said you were working for living. I thought it’d be rude to not take that into account. I’m sorry you’re insulted. I see where you’re coming from, but I feel it’s a little unair that you’re not doing the same for me.” “I feel you’re being condescending,” Blue said. In the background, she caught a glimpse of Soldier Boy making a plane of his hand. It was crashing and weaving toward the table surface while Smudgy Boy gulped laughter down. The elegant boy held his palm over his face in exaggerated horror, fingers spread just enough that she could see him wince. “Dear God,” remarked Cell Phone boy. “I don’t know what else to say.” “Sorry,” she recommended. “I said that already.” Blue considered. “Then ‘bye.’” He made a little gesture at his chest that she thought was supposed to mean he was curtsying or bowing or something sarcastically gentleman-like.

See, I will always have this penchant for what I call kamikaze women. I call them kamikazes because they, you know they crash their plane, they're self-destructive. But they crash into you, and you die along with them.

Did you know that the chances of being in a plane crash are less than 0.00001 per cent? That means that you’re more likely to be killed by a donkey or to naturally conceive identical quadruplets.” Bunty

Every takeoff and landing, when the plane banked too much to one side, I prayed for a crash.

Did you blame the men who fired the guns, the men who built the guns, or the men who invented the guys? Did you blame the men who had put those particular guns in the hands attached to those particular trigger fingers? When Nick's plane crashed into the ocean off Honduras at a speed which turned the ocean to unyielding stone, was it Western Mountain's fault, for sending him out?Nick's, for going? Anne's, for letting him? Did you blame the human beings who had made such a world possible, or the world that had made such human beings possible? The answer, she thought, lying now in her missing daughter's bed (Was it Miranda, for pushing a limit any time she saw one? Anne again, for uprooting her so callously, for failing in some way to adequately console her after her father's death?), was that you had two choices: you could blame everybody, or you could blame nobody.

Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from — and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.

Choose love by choosing acceptance over anger.

That smile of hers could seriously crash planes.

If I die in a plane crash remember to always bag and board your comics.

I don't have any relationship with God and I've never wanted it. I don't believe in fate or in any superior entity; if a plane crashes and people die, it's not because Heaven said so.

People used to die naturally. Old age used to be a terminal affliction, not a temporary state. There were invisible killers called “diseases” that broke the body down. Aging couldn’t be reversed, and there were accidents from which there was no return. Planes fell from the sky. Cars actually crashed. There was pain, misery, despair. It’s hard for most of us to imagine a world so unsafe, with dangers lurking in every unseen, unplanned corner.  All of that is behind us now, and yet a simple truth remains: People have to die. It

I have what you might call “logical empathy” for people I don’t know. That is, I can understand that it’s a shame that those people died in the plane crash. And I understand they have families, and they are sad. But I don’t have any physical reaction to the news. And there’s no reason I should. I don’t know them and the news has no effect on my life. Yes, it’s sad, but the same day thousands of other people died from murder, accident, disease, natural disaster, and all manner of other causes. I feel I must put things like this in perspective and save my worry for things that truly matter to me.

So let's say my bad luck did crash the plane. What exactly are were you going to do about it?' 'Why is the plane crashing?' He was trying to hide a smile now. 'The piolets are passed out and drunk.' 'Easy. I'd fly the plane.' Of course. I pursed my lips and tried again. 'Both engines have exploded and we're falling in a death spiral towards the earth.' 'I'd wait till we were close enough to the ground, get a good grip on you, kick out the wall, and jump. Then, I'd run you back to the scene of the accident, and we'd stumble around like the two luckiest surviours in history.' I stared at him wordlessly. 'What?' He wispered." - Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, Eclipse

I love you, so don’t die in a plane crash. Don’t change your mind. Don’t sleep with another woman. Don’t think about me getting fat or getting stretch marks. Don’t ruin your relationship with Harry to be with me. But be with me. Gah! I know that sounds impossible. But …

Composure and self-restraint were not only desirable characteristics in a woman, they were essental. As my mother put it later, it was bad enough having to worry yourself sick every time your husband went up in an airplane; now, she was being told, she was also supposed to feel responsible if his plane crashed. Anger and discontent, lest they kill, were to be kept to oneself. The military, even more so than the rest of society, clearly put a premium on well-behaved, genteel, and even-tempered women.

Impulsivity is something akin to spontaneously jumping out of an airplane and not realizing that you forgot something until about five seconds before impact.

I'd had some dates that crashed and burned, but not the way that could happen in a plane.

the record for inflated raft survival appears to have been set in 1942, when three navy plane crash victims survived for thirty-four days on the Pacific before reaching an island, where they were sheltered by natives.

It stopped him, the idea of giving thanks. At first his mind just stopped and he thought, for what? For the plane crash, for being here? I should thank somebody for that? Then a small voice, almost a whisper, came into his mind and all it said was: It could have been worse; you could have been down in the plane with the pilot. And

After the Battle of Midway it was clear that the Pacific war would be won by planes launched from ships. Both Japan and the United States began crash programs to build aircraft carriers as fast as possible. During 1943 and 1944, Japan produced seven of these huge, costly vessels. In the same period, the United States produced ninety.

Our story begins eight years ago when Ms. Jacobs was living in London with Mr. McAllister. However, she had to leave the country urgently due to a family emergency.” “Considering the ‘he-was-dead’ defence, I’m sure this will be hugely entertaining.” Lily didn’t see it but she heard the scoffing behind Nate’s attorney’s tone, that would be attorney number two or Sarcastic Attorney. Her startled eyes moved to the man who, she noted distractedly, was staring at her with extreme distaste. “Well, I’m not sure one would describe losing both of one’s parents in a plane crash as ‘entertaining’,” Alistair noted blandly.

We're all in crashing plane, and everybody is fighting over who gets to sit in first class.

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. She was ashamed that such a simple insight should have eluded her all these years. Make something beautiful of your life. Wasn't that the adage of Sister Mary Joseph Praise lived by? Hema's second thought was that she, deliverer of countless babies, she who'd rejected the kind of marriage her parents wanted for her, she who felt there were too many children in the world and felt no pressure to add to that number, understood for the first time that having a child was about cheating death. Children were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse, or a flea that lived on the bodies of men. If, as Matron and Sister Mary Joseph Praise believed, there was a raising of the dead, then a child would be sure to see that its parents were awakened. Provided, of course, the child didn't die with you in a plane crash.

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?

Roman said, “When you think a specific bad thing is going to happen, it never does. I don’t mean like if you think it looks like rain it won’t rain, but like if you think your plane will crash, it won’t.” Yale shook his head. “I want to live in your world. Doom is beautiful, and you can control your fate.

Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a run-away milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the D-Day Invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest-stop on I-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald’s French fries on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye. But more important than any of these was the vast, accretive weight of small things, from planes which hadn’t crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that weren’t random, ten thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness. He saw the old people of River Crossing and Roland kneeling in the dust for Aunt Talitha’s blessing; again heard her giving it freely and gladly. Heard her telling him to lay the cross she had given him at the foot of the Dark Tower and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth. He saw the Tower itself in the burning folds of the rose and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that were and held them steady in time’s great helix. For every brick that landed on the ground instead of some little kid’s head, for every tornado that missed the trailer park, for every missile that didn’t fly, for every hand stayed from violence, there was the Tower. And the quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.

She got on a plane to see a client in California and somewhere over Colorado, the pilot somehow missed the sky.

The truth isn’t always going to be handed to you. Sometimes, you have to fight for it.

The last clear definite function of man—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man....For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man—when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back. This you may say and know it and know it. This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live—for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live—for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know—fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

They explained about the epidurals and drugs, but no one there was going to have drugs. They all wanted the natural experience. It all seemed wrapped in plastic, unreal, like stewardesses on planes demonstrating the seat belts and the patterns for orderly disembarkatation in case of a crash at sea, the people taking a glance at the cards in the seat pocket in front of them. Sure, they thought, no problem. A peek at the nearest exit and then they were ready for in-flight service, peanuts and a movie.

Love was like piloting a jet through a mountain range, blind. It was freeing and exhilarating, but at the same time, at any second the person risking their life piloting that plane could crash and burn, shattering into nothing but dust - all for one glorious ride.

In a real situation, like when I was here before, there were things wrong—going wrong. The plane didn’t land and set me on the shore. It crashed. A man was dead. I was hurt. I didn’t know anything. Nothing at all. I was, maybe, close to death and now we’re out here going la-de-da, I’ve got a fish; la-de-da, there are some more berries.

I’m passing the bar Where you first got in my car I’m not ashamed to admit That it’s you I won’t forget I saved your cigarettes and Bad habits I regret But the hours flew by like clouds Whenever I had you around Parachute lover Take me away From the plane that went crashing And the earth that’s in flames Saving you is saving me High above the redwood trees But down below I see shadows And parachute debris We're drifting like children Along for the ride Each time we find love Another parachute arrives Our madness will burn As bright as the sun And I’ll keep finding lovers But you were the one

This is not your fucking captain speaking". Dietrich's voice squawked over the intercom. "Don't fucking bother me. If you can't locate exits, well you're shit out of luck. Head's in the rear of the plane and I didn't pack shit for you motherfucker's to eat so deal with it. This flight will take approximately one hour. Don't make me crash the fucking plane. Cause I will if I deem it necessary" Dietrich- Enslaved In Shadows

The more automated society gets and the more powerful the attacking AI becomes, the more devastating cyberwarfare can be. If you can hack and crash your enemy’s self-driving cars, auto-piloted planes, nuclear reactors, industrial robots, communication systems, financial systems and power grids, then you can effectively crash his economy and cripple his defenses. If you can hack some of his weapons systems as well, even better.

I don’t believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die—I don’t want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created—but I believe there has to be something. Yeah, something. Some kind of insensate force for the good … I think there’s a force that keeps drunken teenagers—most drunken teenagers—from crashing their cars when they’re coming home from the senior prom or their first big rock concert.That keeps most planes from crashing even when something goes wrong. Not all, just most. Hey, the fact that no one’s used a nuclear weapon on actual living people since 1945 suggests that there has to be something on our side. Sooner or later someone will, of course, but over a half a century … that’s a long time. There’s something that keeps most of us from dying in our sleep. No perfect loving all-seeing God, I don’t think the evidence supports that, but a force.

What are the things that make adults depressed? The master list is too comprehensive to quantify (plane crashes, unemployment, killer bees, impotence, Stringer Bell's murder, gambling addictions, crib death, the music of Bon Iver, et al.) But whenever people talk about their personal bouts of depression in the abstract, there are two obstructions I hear more than any other. The possibility that one's life is not important, and the mundane predictability of day-to-day existence. Talk to a depressed person (particularly one who's nearing midlife), and one (or both) of these problems will inevitably be described. Since the end of World War II, every generation of American children has been endlessly conditioned to believe that their lives are supposed to be great -- a meaningful life is not just possible, but required. Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it's interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all. At the same time, we concede that a compelling life is supposed to be spontaneous and unpredictable-- any artistic depiction of someone who does the same thing every day portrays that character as tragically imprisoned (January Jones on Mad Men, Ron Livingston in Office Space, the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby," all novels set in affluent suburbs, pretty much every project Sam Mendes has ever conceived, etc.) If you know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, the voltage of that experience is immediately mitigated. Yet most lives are the same, 95 percent of the time. And most lives aren't extrinsically meaningful, unless you're delusionally self-absorbed or authentically Born Again. So here's where we find the creeping melancholy of modernity: The one thing all people are supposed to inherently deserve- a daily subsistence that's both meaningful and unpredictable-- tends to be an incredibly rare commodity. If it's not already there, we cannot manufacture it.

She hated using airplane toilets. She was always afraid the plane would choose the exact moment she was most defenseless to crash, and she’d spend her final seconds of life spiraling toward earth with her bottom bare to the world.

Harris loved to read and he shared everything he read. He read to whoever happened to be in the room from whatever paper he happened to be making his way through. Ann Landers and the horoscope, of course, headlines, cartoons, Miss Manners, Heloise, the lives of others, in many forms, long articles on astronomy or anthropology, political pieces, op-ed pieces, book reviews, church bazaars, executions, plane crashes, disco artists, whatever caught his interest.

We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who Comes on at five She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam In her eye It's interesting when people die - Give us dirty laundry Can we film the operation? Is the head dead yet? You know, the boys in the newsroom got a Running bet Get the widow on the set! We need dirty laundry You don't really need to find out what's going on You don't really want to know just how far it's gone Just leave well enough alone Eat your dirty laundry

Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip. I prayed for wind shear effect. I prayed for pelicans sucked into the turbines and loose bolts and ice on the wings. On takeoff, as the plane pushed down the runway and the flaps tilted up, with our seats in their full upright position and our tray tables stowed and all personal carry-on baggage in the overhead compartment, as the end of the runway ran up to meet us with our smoking materials extinguished, I prayed for a crash.

Yes, interest! The worm of interest. Are you surprised? No? Yes? One conclusion I have reached here after a year in my cell is that the only emotion people feel nowadays is interest or the lack of it. Curiosity and interest and boredom have replaced the so-called emotions we used to read about in novels or see registered on actors' faces. Even the horrors of the age translate into interest. Did you ever watch anybody pick up a newspaper and read the headline PLANE CRASH KILLS THREE HUNDRED? How horrible! says the reader. But look at him when he hands you the paper. Is he horrified? No, he is interested. When is the last time you saw anybody horrified?

Must you always speak with so many pop culture references?" "I must, yes, but no one's making pop culture anymore, so I'm starting to feel dated. I haven't seen a new movie in two years. And you know what else I just realized?" The doctor stared at him. "I'm never going to find out what the hell was going on with Lost. I mean, was it just sheer coincidence their plane crashed on the island or was it this Jacob guy pulling the strings all along? And how did most of them end up back in the 1970s with the Dharma people?

that I would give up my life readily if I found myself in war, or if my plane crashed into a desert. I would struggle tooth and nail to survive. It’s as though my life and I, having sat in opposition to each other, hating each other, wanting to escape each other, have now bonded forever and at the hip. The opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality, and my life, as I write this, is vital, even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It’s a precious discovery. Almost every day I feel momentary flashes of hopelessness and wonder every time whether I am slipping. For a petrifying instant here and there, a lightning-quick flash, I want a car to run me over and I have to grit my teeth to stay on the sidewalk until the light turns green; or I imagine how easily I might cut my wrists; or I taste hungrily the metal tip of a gun in my mouth; or I picture going to sleep and never waking up again. I hate those feelings, but I know that they have driven me to look deeper at life, to find and cling to reasons for living. I cannot find it in me to regret entirely the course my life has taken. Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely and sometimes against the moment’s reason, to be alive. Is that not a rare joy?

Consider how many times you’ve seen either a crashed plane or a crashed car. It’s entirely possible you’ve seen roughly as many of each—yet many of those cars were on the road next to you, whereas the planes were probably on another continent, transmitted to you via the Internet or television. In the United States, for instance, the total number of people who have lost their lives in commercial plane crashes since the year 2000 would not be enough to fill Carnegie Hall even half full. In contrast, the number of people in the United States killed in car accidents over that same time is greater than the entire population of Wyoming. Simply

But someday I'll fall in love again, right? I'll start over with someone, and maybe we'll buy a big old house with all this new money I have, and we'll have kids, and I'll be a professional writer, maybe even write some books. I'll have this whole great life, and it will be thanks to Hailey dying in a plane crash. And I don't know exactly at what point it will happen, but the time will come when I'll have crossed this line where maybe I wouldn't go back to save her, because I'll know that if it weren't for her dying, I wouldn't have this family I love, and this life I'm living. And the thought of that, of becoming the person who wouldn't go back to save her...

Ethan gives her a smile - and wow, he could probably ask for her social security number, a major credit card, and to bear his children, and she'd say yes. "Of course," he says. "I mean it's not like he's ever crashed a plane or anything. Right?" "Just the once," she says, before straightening with a wink of her own and continuing down the aisle.

Simply, this is what she believed: she believed that the universe showed each of us certain things, that it made certain things open. Many people lived a peace life with nothing ever happening to them. But into some families other things fell. Some families were afflicted with random tragedies - car accidents, plane accidents, hang gliding accidents, bus crashes, knifing, drownings, scarves getting caught under the wheels of their Rolls Royces, breaking their necks.

There are kinds of human problems which really do seem, as our tidy expressions would have it, to “come to a head” and “demand to be dealt with.” But there are also problems, often just as serious, which come to nothing that we can recognize or openly deal with. Some long-lived, insidious problems simply slip us off to one side of ourselves. Some gently rob us of just enough energy or faith so that days which once took place on a horizontal plane become an endless series of uphill slogs. And some—like high water working year after year at the roots of a riverside tree—quietly undercut our trust or our hope, our sense of place, or of humor, our ability to empathize, or to feel enthused, and we don’t sense impending danger, we don’t feel the damage at all, till one day, to our amazement, we find ourselves crashing to the ground.

I'm not, for example, going to say that I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just do it. I don't hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I hope that the next time that I get on a plane it doesn't crash. To hope for some result means that you have no agency concerning it.... When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to "hope" at all. We simply do the work.... We do whatever it takes.

The safety gap is so large, in fact, that planes would still be safer than cars even if the threat of terrorism were unimaginably worse than it actually is: An American professor calculated that even if terrorists were hijacking and crashing one passenger jet a week in the United States, a person who took one flight a month for a year would have only a 1-in-135,000 chance of being killed in a hijacking--a trivial risk compared to the annual 1-in-6,000 odds of being killed in a car crash.

For some reason, these days we tend to downplay the importance of aggression, of taking risks, of barreling forward. It’s probably because it’s been negatively associated with certain notions of violence or masculinity. But of course Earhart shows that that isn’t true. In fact, on the side of her plane she painted the words, “Always think with your stick forward.” That is: You can’t ever let up your flying speed—if you do, you crash.

No, on the outside view there was nothing for anyone to notice about me. I remained one pillar of a trinity, another pillar was lying only temporarily (temporarily! temporarily! temporarily!) in the hospital, I was the pilot of a three-engine aircraft, one of whose engines had stalled: there is no reason to panic, this is not a crash landing, the pilot has thousands of flight hours behind him, he will land the plane safely on the ground.

He Said. "David, you must remember that in all the functions we have in life, art is the one place where we can crash our plane and walk away from it". And that's so right. Creating something is the one area where you mustn't have caution or inhibition. If you make a startling, disastrous mess, it's fine, because you can reach out and reevaluate and plunge off into another direction. Bowie on Eno and art Interview Magazine September 1995

Years later, a different therapist asked her exactly what she was afraid of. Varya was initially stumped, not because she didn’t know what she was afraid of but because it was harder to think of what she wasn’t. “So give me some examples,” said the therapist, and that night Varya made a list. Cancer. Climate change. Being the victim of a car crash. Being the cause of a car crash. (There was a period when the thought of killing a bicyclist while making a right turn caused Vaya to follow any bicyclist for blocks, checking again and again to make sure she hadn’t.) Gunmen, Plane crashes – sudden doom! People wearing Band-Aids. AIDS ¬¬- really, all types of viruses and bacteria and disease. Infecting someone else. Dirty surfaces, soiled linens, bodily secretions. Drugstores and pharmacies. Ticks and bedbugs and lice. Chemicals. The homeless. Crowds. Uncertainty and risk and open-ended endings. Responsibility and guilt. She is even afraid of her own mind. She is afraid of its power, of what it does to her.

Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresta think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor? The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment. The organism is needy or not needy accordingly as needs are satisfied or not satisfied by its environment. The self in a world is rich or poor accordingly as it succeeds in identifying its otherwise unspeakable self, e.g., mythically, by identifying itself with a world-sign, such as a totem; religiously, by identifying itself as a creature of God...In a post-religious age, the only recourses of the self are self as transcendent and self as immanent. The impoverishment of the immanent self derives from a perceived loss of sovereignty to "them," the transcending scientists and experts of society. As a consequence, the self sees its only recourse as an endless round of work, diversion, and consumption of goods and services. Failing this and having some inkling of its plight, it sees no way out because it has come to see itself as an organism in an environment and so can't understand why it feels so bad in the best of all possible environments--say, a good family and a good home in a good neighborhood in East Orange on a fine Wednesday afternoon--and so finds itself secretly relishing bad news, assassinations, plane crashes, and the misfortunes of neighbors, and even comes secretly to hope for catastrophe, earthquake, hurricane, wars, apocalypse--anything to break out of the iron grip of immanence.

The mind is more comfortable in reckoning probabilities in terms of the relative frequency of remembered or imagined events. That can make recent and memorable events - a plane crash, a shark attack, an anthrax infection - loom larger on one's worry list than more frequent and boring events, such as the car crashes and ladder falls that get printed beneath the fold on page B14. And it can lead risk experts to speak one language and ordinary people to hear another. In hearings for a proposed nuclear waste site, an expert might present a fault tree that lays out the conceivable sequences of events by which radioactivity might escape. For example, erosion, cracks in the bedrock, accidental drilling, or improper sealing might cause the release of radioactivity into groundwater. In turn, groundwater movement, volcanic activity, or an impact of a large meteorite might cause the release of radioactive wastes into the biosphere. Each train of events can be assigned a probability, and the aggregate probability of an accident from all the causes can be estimated. When people hear these analyses, however, the are not reassured but become more fearful than ever. They hadn't realized there are so many ways for something to go wrong! They mentally tabulate the number of disaster scenarios, rather than mentally aggregating the probabilities of the disaster scenarios.

I went to the corner store—it was early morning—and saw on the small television above the counter that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Quickly I returned to the apartment and turned on the television, and Becka sat watching, and I went into the kitchen to drop off whatever I had bought, and I heard Becka cry out, “Mommy!” The second plane had gone into the second tower, and when I ran to answer her cry, her look was so stricken: I think always of that moment. I think: This was the end of her childhood.

When aircraft engines fail, it is not the end of the flight. The planes don't fall like stones from the sky. They glide along the huge multi-engine passenger planes for 30 to 45 minutes, before crashing during the landing attempt. The passengers don't notice anything. Flying feels no different when engines are out than when engines are running. It is quieter, but only a little quieter: louder than the engines is the wind breaking against the fuselage and wings. At a certain point, for those who look out the window, the earth or the sea are frighteningly close. Or the film is being shown and the flight attendants have closed the blinds. Perhaps the passengers experience the slightly slower flight as particularly pleasant.

In September 1942, a B-17 crashed in the Pacific, stranding nine men on a raft. Within a few days, one had died and the rest had gone mad. Two heard music and baying dogs. One was convinced that a navy plane was pushing the raft from behind. Two scuffled over an imaginary case of beer. Another shouted curses at a sky that he believed was full of bombers. Seeing a delusory boat, he pitched himself overboard and drowned. On day six, when a plane flew by, the remaining men had to confer to be sure that it was real. When they were rescued on day seven, they were too weak to wave their arms.

Depression goes through stages, but if left unchecked and not treated, this elevator ride will eventually go all the way to the bottom floor. And finally you find yourself bereft of choices, unable to figure out a way up or out, and pretty soon one overarching impulse begins winning the battle for your mind: “Kill yourself.” And once you get over the shock of those words in your head, the horror of it, it begins to start sounding appealing, even possessing a strange resolve, logic. In fact, it’s the only thing you have left that is logical. It becomes the only road to relief. As if just the planning of it provides the first solace you’ve felt that you can remember. And you become comfortable with it. You begin to plan it and contemplate the details of how best to do it, as if you were planning travel arrangements for a vacation. You just have to get out. O-U-T. You see the white space behind the letter O? You just want to crawl through that O and be out of this inescapable hurt that is this thing they call clinical depression. “How am I going to do this?” becomes the only tape playing. And if you are really, really, really depressed and you’re really there, you’re gonna find a way. I found a way. I had a way. And I did it. I made sure Opal was out of the house and on a business trip. My planning took a few weeks. I knew exactly how I was going to do it: I didn’t want to make too much of a mess. There was gonna be no blood, no drama. There was just going to be, “Now you see me, now you don’t.” That’s what it was going to be. So I did it. And it was over. Or so I thought. About twenty-four hours later I woke up. I was groggy; zoned out to the point at which I couldn’t put a sentence together for the next couple of days. But I was semifunctional, and as these drugs and shit that I took began to wear off slowly but surely, I realized, “Okay, I fucked up. I didn’t make it.” I thought I did all the right stuff, left no room for error, but something happened. And this perfect, flawless plan was thwarted. As if some force rebuked me and said, “Not yet. You’re not going anywhere.” The only reason I could have made it, after the amount of pills and alcohol and shit I took, was that somebody or something decided it wasn’t my time. It certainly wasn’t me making that call. It was something external. And when you’re infused with the presence of this positive external force, which is so much greater than all of your efforts to the contrary, that’s about as empowering a moment as you can have in your life. These days we have a plethora of drugs one can take to ameliorate the intensity of this lack of hope, lack of direction, lack of choice. So fuck it and don’t be embarrassed or feel like you can handle it yourself, because lemme tell ya something: you can’t. Get fuckin’ help. The negative demon is strong, and you may not be as fortunate as I was. My brother wasn’t. For me, despair eventually gave way to resolve, and resolve gave way to hope, and hope gave way to “Holy shit. I feel better than I’ve ever felt right now.” Having actually gone right up to the white light, looked right at it, and some force in the universe turned me around, I found, with apologies to Mr. Dylan, my direction home. I felt more alive than I’ve ever felt. I’m not exaggerating when I say for the next six months I felt like Superman. Like I’m gonna fucking go through walls. That’s how strong I felt. I had this positive force in me. I was saved. I was protected. I was like the only guy who survived and walked away from a major plane crash. I was here to do something big. What started as the darkest moment in my life became this surge of focus, direction, energy, and empowerment.

In a series of experiments, safety officials ran regular people through mock evacuations from planes. The trials weren't nearly as stressful as real evacuations, of course, but it didn't matter. People, especially women, hesitated for a surprisingly long time before jumping onto the slide. That pause slowed the evacuation for everyone. But there was a way to get people to move faster. If a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared, the researchers found. In fact, if flight attendants did not aggressively direct the evacuation, they might as well have not been there at all. A study by the Cranfield University Aviation Safety Centre found that people moved just as slowly for polite and calm flight attendants as they did when there were no flight attendants present.

The second I get into a car and we start driving, I imagine a fatal crash to the last detail. When I’m in the liquor store, I imagine a robbery by the time the cashier tells me the total. Every plane ride is an 8-hour movie in my head of me planning what I would say to the stranger on my right if the pilot announced the plane was crashing. I always imagine these scenarios. Family dying. Earthquakes. The earth suddenly falling because gravity left the party. It’s exhausting. Yesterday someone was afraid of me. I was bicycling with Austin and we saw a dead deer on the road. It was so large. Austin nearly fell off his bike when he saw it. Then he looked over at me confused. He asked why I didn't react to it. I told him it was because I’d already imagined one six miles back. There are always two worlds playing in my head at once: what’s in front of me and what could be.

23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain 1.    Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own. 2.    Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable. 3.    Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place. 4.    Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self. 5.    Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops. 6.    Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat. 7.    Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet. 8.    Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like. 9.    Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head. 10.    Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm. 11.    Vemödalen: The frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist. 12.    Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening 13.    Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out. 14.    Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence. 15.    Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire. 16.    Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it. 17.    Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone. 18.    Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness. 19.    Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore. 20.    Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time. 21.    Liberosis: The desire to care less about things. 22.    Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years. 23.    Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective. John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Simon & Schuster, November 16, 2021)

It takes will power and nerve to hold the stick that way, to keep his eyes open and watch the rocky face of the cliff, pine-bearded, rush up at them. O'Shaughnessy's mouth flattens, his face goes white. And then in that final fraction of a moment, he laughs, a little crazily - a laugh of defiance, of mocking farewell, and, somehow, of conquest. 'Here we go, baby!' he shouts, teeth bared. 'Now I'm going to find out what it really feels like to fly into the side of a mountain!...' There is only the storm to hear the smash of the plane as it splinters itself against the rock - and the storm drowns the sound out with thunder, just as the lightning turns pale the flame that rises, like a hungry tongue, from the wreckage. ("Jane Browns Body")

Dear Bill, I came to this black wall again, to see and touch your name. William R. Stocks. And as I do, I wonder if anyone ever stops to realize that next to your name, on this black wall, is your mother's heart. A heart broken fifteen years ago today, when you lost your life in Vietnam. And as I look at your name, I think of how many, many times I used to wonder how scared and homesick you must have been, in that strange country called Vietnam. And if and how it might have changed you, for you were the most happy-go-lucky kid in the world, hardly ever sad or unhappy. And until the day I die, I will see you as you laughed at me, even when I was very mad at you. And the next thing I knew, we were laughing together. But on this past New Year's Day, I talked by phone to a friend of yours from Michigan, who spent your last Christmas and the last four months of your life with you. Jim told me how you died, for he was there and saw the helicopter crash. He told me how your jobs were like sitting ducks; they would send you men out to draw the enemy into the open, and then, they would send in the big guns and planes to take over. He told me how after a while over there, instead of a yellow streak, the men got a mean streak down their backs. Each day the streak got bigger, and the men became meaner. Everyone but you, Bill. He said how you stayed the same happy-go-lucky guy that you were when you arrived in Vietnam. And he said how you, of all people, should never have been the one to die. How lucky you were to have him for a friend. And how lucky he was to have had you. They tell me the letters I write to you and leave here at this memorial are waking others up to the fact that there is still much pain left from the Vietnam War. But this I know; I would rather to have had you for twenty-one years and all the pain that goes with losing you, than never to have had you at all. -Mom

Pilots were not excused all these rigorous new checks, and when Woodie Menear’s turn came, the security screener expressed concern about the presence of a pair of tweezers in his cabin baggage. As it happened, tweezers – unlike corkscrews or metal scissors, for example – were not on the list of forbidden items; Menear was not breaching regulations by trying to bring them on board. But the official paused just long enough to spark frustration on the part of the pilot, who, like his colleagues, had been growing ever more exasperated by each new restriction. This time it was too much. Menear did not explode in rage; he merely asked a sarcastic question. But it was one that would lead to his immediate arrest, a night in jail, his suspension by US Airways, and months of legal wranglings before he was finally acquitted of ‘making terroristic threats’ and permitted to return to his job. ‘Why are you worried about tweezers,’ Menear asked, ‘when I could crash the plane?

For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back. This you may say and know it and know it. This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live- for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live- for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know- fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash. Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. Their daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

Necessities 1 A map of the world. Not the one in the atlas, but the one in our heads, the one we keep coloring in. With the blue thread of the river by which we grew up. The green smear of the woods we first made love in. The yellow city we thought was our future. The red highways not traveled, the green ones with their missed exits, the black side roads which took us where we had not meant to go. The high peaks, recorded by relatives, though we prefer certain unmarked elevations, the private alps no one knows we have climbed. The careful boundaries we draw and erase. And always, around the edges, the opaque wash of blue, concealing the drop-off they have stepped into before us, singly, mapless, not looking back. 2 The illusion of progress. Imagine our lives without it: tape measures rolled back, yardsticks chopped off. Wheels turning but going nowhere. Paintings flat, with no vanishing point. The plots of all novels circular; page numbers reversing themselves past the middle. The mountaintop no longer a goal, merely the point between ascent and descent. All streets looping back on themselves; life as a beckoning road an absurd idea. Our children refusing to grow out of their childhoods; the years refusing to drag themselves toward the new century. And hope, the puppy that bounds ahead, no longer a household animal. 3 Answers to questions, an endless supply. New ones that startle, old ones that reassure us. All of them wrong perhaps, but for the moment solutions, like kisses or surgery. Rising inflections countered by level voices, words beginning with w hushed by declarative sentences. The small, bold sphere of the period chasing after the hook, the doubter that walks on water and treads air and refuses to go away. 4 Evidence that we matter. The crash of the plane which, at the last moment, we did not take. The involuntary turn of the head, which caused the bullet to miss us. The obscene caller who wakes us at midnight to the smell of gas. The moon's full blessing when we fell in love, its black mood when it was all over. Confirm us, we say to the world, with your weather, your gifts, your warnings, your ringing telephones, your long, bleak silences. 5 Even now, the old things first things, which taught us language. Things of day and of night. Irrational lightning, fickle clouds, the incorruptible moon. Fire as revolution, grass as the heir to all revolutions. Snow as the alphabet of the dead, subtle, undeciphered. The river as what we wish it to be. Trees in their humanness, animals in their otherness. Summits. Chasms. Clearings. And stars, which gave us the word distance, so we could name our deepest sadness.