“How do you think it would feel to be obliged to ask for a seat-belt extender on an airplane? For the unfashionably bulgy, life is a series of small humiliations.”

The real reason women fall in love abroad is not that they are free of domestic inhibitions but that they translate their love of stone and place into love of flesh. … Is this true?

It’s the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive – it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.

my love of water … is mingled with and almost indistinguishable from a fear of water (I can float in a vertical position – I enter a fugue state – but I cannot bear to bury my face in water).

the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

Porches are America’s lost rooms.

I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.

Italians’ relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay.

Food is my drug of choice.

What you desire you call into being.

it’s perfectly possible to hate one’s fat and to love one’s body at the same time.

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.

Kindness and intelligence don’t always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.

The triad is our ability of the United States to conduct nuclear attacks using airplanes, using missiles launched from silos or from the ground, and also from our nuclear subs’ ability to attack. And it’s important – all three of them are critical. It gives us the ability at deterrence.

Airplanes may kill you, but they ain’t likely to hurt you.

Oldtimers, weekends, and airplane landings are alike. If you can walk away from them, they’re successful.

I’ve owned 41 airplanes. A few of them would talk with me. This little seaplane, though, we’ve had long conversations in flight.

An airplane has two million, and it has to stay up in the air.

Nine g’s is good, if the pilot can stand it.

We couldn’t stand it. Not in the airplanes of World War II.

It’s very cool for me to be able to get in an airplane and fly for fourteen hours