With a bending sail we glided rapidly by Tyngsborough and Chelmsford, each holding in one hand half of a tart country apple pie wh...ich we had purchased to celebrate our return, and in the other a fragment of the newspaper in which it was wrapped, devouring these with divided relish, and learning the news which had transpired since we sailed. The river here opened into a broad and straight reach of great length, which we bounded merrily over before a smacking breeze, with a devil-may-care look in our faces, and our boat a white bone in its mouth, and a speed which greatly astonished some scow boatmen whom we met. The wind in the horizon rolled like a flood over valley and plain, and every tree bent to the blast, and the mountains like school-boys turned their cheeks to it.... Thus we sailed, not being able to fly, but as next best, making a long furrow in the fields of the Merrimack toward our home, with our wings spread, but never lifting our heel from the watery trench; gracefully plowing homeward with our brisk and willing team, wind and stream, pulling together, the former yet a wild steer, yoked to his more sedate fellow. It was very near flying, as when the duck rushes through the water with an impulse of her wings, throwing the spray about her before she can rise. How we had stuck fast if drawn up but a few feet on the shore!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight)... Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man with lantern: Who are you? Captain: The Flying Cloud. 220 days out of New York and 50 days trying to find your blasted ha...rbor. Man with lantern: Nobody asked you to come. Captain: Got anything in this hog-end of the world except fog? Man with lantern: Sure, we've got gold, fountains of gold.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Casting me adrift, 3500 miles from a port of call. You're sending me to my doom, eh? Well, you're wrong, Christian! I'll take this... boat as she floats to England if I must. I'll live to see you--all of you--hanging from the highest yardarms in the British fleet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Lord of the lash, the Loup Garou Kid. Half breed son of Pisces and... Aquarius. I hold the souls of men in my pot. I do the dirty boogie with scorpions. I make the bulls keep still and was the first swinger to grape the taste.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand. Those flying fish, they're not leaping for joy, they're jumping in terror.... Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies, the glitter of putrescence. There's no beauty here, only death and decay.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An aspiring genius was D. Green: The son of a farmer, age fourteen;... His body was long and lank and lean-- Just right for flying, as will be seen;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dizzy: Say, don't you think about anything but flying? When did the bug first bite you? Tommy: You remember the day Lindy cam...e back from Paris?... I was only a kid, but I'll never forget it. They wrote "Welcome Home" with smoke across the sky and signed it QB.... I didn't even know what QB meant. Then someone told me about the quiet burglar. Old pilots joining together to help the flying game. I loved that. They seemed apart from ordinary people. Dizzy: Oh they were. That, that first QB hanger was a great place. Each pilot had his own drinking mug, and whenever one got bumped off, they put the mug on the shelf over the bar, bottom up, and your first drink was always a silent toast to the shelf.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »