Air Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I stepped out into the night air that nobody had yet found out how to option. But a lot of people were probably trying. They'd get around to it.

Raymond Chandler

There is no secrecy comparable to celerity; like the motion of a bullet in the air, it flies so swift that it outruns the eye.

A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded.
It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior.

She makes me get up just at the same time every morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem to let any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for — well, it 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and sweat — I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in there, I can't chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell — everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it.

Go into a room where the shutters are always shut (in a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut), and though the room be uninhabited — though the air has never been polluted by the breathing of human beings, you will observe a close, musty smell of corrupt air — of air unpurified by the effect of the sun's rays.

Florence Nightingale

I know that you don't believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He that can swim needs not despair to fly; to swim is to fly in a grosser fluid, and to fly is to swim in a subtler. We are only to proportion our power of resistance to the different density of matter through which we are to pass. You will be necessarily upborne by the air if you can renew any impulse upon it faster than the air can recede from the pressure...

I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass and every passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of delight for me.

Charles Dickens

The wide stare stared itself out for one while; the Sun went down in a red, green, golden glory; the stars came out in the heavens, and the fire-flies mimicked them in the lower air, as men may feebly imitate the goodness of a better order of beings; the long dusty roads and the interminable plains were in repose-and so deep a hush was on the sea, that it scarcely whispered of the time when it shall give up its dead.

Charles Dickens

Next to a leisurely walk I enjoy a spin on my tandem bicycle. It is splendid to feel the wind blowing in my face and the springy motion of my iron steed. The rapid rush through the air gives me a delicious sense of strength and buoyancy, and the exercise makes my pulse dance and my heart sing.

What is an odor? Is it an emanation of material particles into the air, or is it a form of vibration like sound? If you can decide that, it might be the starting point for a new investigation. If it is an emanation, you might be able to weigh it; and if it is a vibration, you should be able to reflect it from a mirror.

Alexander Graham Bell

There's a natural mystic blowing through the air. If you listen carefully now, you will hear.

The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death; not death as it shews in shroud and coffin, but in the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven: and the gross air of the world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed.

Charles Dickens

We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.

"I know quite enough of myself," said Bella, with a charming air of being inclined to give herself up as a bad job, "and I don't improve upon acquaintance..."

Charles Dickens

He's of the colour of the nutmeg. And of the heat of the ginger.... he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him, but only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him; he is indeed a horse, and all other jades you may call beasts.

William Shakespeare

He had a certain air of being a handsome man-which he was not; and a certain air of being a well-bred man-which he was not. It was mere swagger and challenge; but in this particular, as in many others, blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world.

Charles Dickens

The symptoms or the sufferings generally considered to be inevitable and incident to the disease are very often not symptoms of the disease at all, but of something quite different-of the want of fresh air, or of light, or of warmth, or of quiet, or of cleanliness, or of punctuality and care in the administration of diet, of each or of all of these.

Florence Nightingale

The night has been unruly: where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i' th'air; strange screams of death.

William Shakespeare

The man who eats to live, who is friends with the five powers - earth, water, ether, sun and air - who is a servant of God, the Creator of all these, ought not to fall ill.

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com'st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee: I'll call thee Hamlet,
King, father; royal Dane, O! answer me.

William Shakespeare

There is a certain degree of satisfaction in having the courage to admit one's errors. It not only clears up the air of guilt and defensiveness, but often helps solve the problem created by the error

They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

How full of creative genius is the air in which these are generated! I should hardly admire them more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat.

Henry David Thoreau

Nobody could catch cold by the sea; nobody wanted appetite by the sea; nobody wanted spirits; nobody wanted strength. Sea air was healing, softening, relaxing - fortifying and bracing - seemingly just as was wanted - sometimes one, sometimes the other. If the sea breeze failed, the seabath was the certain corrective; and where bathing disagreed, the sea air alone was evidently designed by nature for the cure.