Quotes by Women Aviators

Amy Johnson

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Beryl Markham

Jacqueline Cochran

Jean Batten

Louise Thaden

Nancy Bird Walton

It comes with faith, for with complete faith there is no fear of what faces you in life or death.

Jacqueline Cochran

We tend not to choose the unknown, which might be a shock or a disappointment or simply a little difficult to cope with. An yet it is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is the most enriching.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A man can be riddled with malaria for years on end, with its chills and its fevers and its nightmares, but if one day he sees that the water from his kidneys is black, he knows he will not leave that place again, wherever he is, or wherever he hoped to be.

And what have we now in Germany? A land of bankers and car-makers. Even our great army has gone soft. Soldiers wear beards and question orders. I am not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism. I still wear the Iron Cross with diamonds Hitler gave me. But today in all Germany you can't find a single person who voted Adolf Hitler into power. Many Germans feel guilty about the war. But they don't explain the real guilt we share — That we lost.

If you have flown, perhaps you can understand the love a pilot develops for flight. It is much the same emotion a man feels for a woman, or a wife for her husband.

As a four-year-old, my mother told me I was climbing the fence, jumping off and calling myself an 'eppyplane' … I bought books on aeroplanes, I followed everything in the newspapers about aeroplanes. Amy Johnson flew to Australia in 1930 - why couldn't I do something like that?

Nancy Bird Walton

I remember so vividly my first time aloft that I can still hear the wind swing in the wires as we glided down. By the time the pilot touched the wheels gently to earth, I knew my future in airplanes and flying was as inevitable as the freckles on my nose.

Setting off unknown to face the unknown, against parental opposition, with no money, friends, or influence, ran it a close second. Clichés like "blazing trails," flying over "shark-infected seas," "battling with monsoons," and "forced landings amongst savage tribes" became familiar diet for breakfast. Unknown names became household words, whilst others, those of the failures, were forgotten utterly except by kith and kin.

Every flyer who ventures across oceans to distant lands is a potential explorer; in his or her breast burns the same fire that urged the adventurers of old to set forth in their sailing-ships for foreign lands.