Robin Olds Quotes

#1. The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Charles Buxton

#2. How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.

Philip Johnson

#3. Fighter pilot is an attitude. It is cockiness. It is aggressiveness. It is self-confidence. It is a streak of rebelliousness, and it is competitiveness. But there's something else - there's a spark. There's a desire to be good. To do well; in the eyes of your peers, and in your own mind.

Robin Olds

#4. Anybody who doesn't have fear is an idiot. It's just that you must make the fear work for you. Hell when somebody shot at me, it made me madder than hell, and all I wanted to do was shoot back.

Robin Olds

#5. Disabled people need more invested in their education, housing, job training, transportation, assistive technology, and independent-living facilities. Governments earn back this investment - and more - by making people with disabilities economically productive citizens.

Jesse Ventura

#6. It got more exciting with each war. I mean the planes were going faster than hell when I was flying a Mustang, but by the time I got to Nam, it scared the piss out of a lot of guys just to fly the damn jets at full speed. Let alone do it in combat.

Robin Olds

#7. It became the middle finger I couldn't raise in PR photographs. The mustache became my silent last word in the verbal battles I was losing with higher headquarters on rules, targets, and fighting the war.

Robin Olds

#8. Eventually we find that we no longer need silence. We no longer need solitude. We no longer even need words. We can make all our actions holy. We can cook a meal for our family and it becomes prayer. We can go for a walk in the park and it becomes prayer.

Mark Haddon

#9. I think it is love of that blue vault of sky that becomes your playground if, and only if, you are a fighter pilot. You don't understand it if you fly from A to B in straight and level, and merely climb and descend. You're moving through the basement of that bolt of blue.

Robin Olds

#10. We crossed a small but sturdy wooden bridge a little later, but no trolls were taking tolls.

Roger Zelazny

#11. computer-majiggies,

Daniel Jose Older

#12. But that's the wrong question. Ask why everyone else is so pathetically stupid and why they're always whining about detention, I should get a medal for not slapping people in the face every day.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#13. You're not a normal priest, are you?'
He gave her a smile that hit her like a slap to the face and a kiss on the mouth all at once.
'My God, I hope not.

Tiffany Reisz

#14. Any time freedom is allowed it will be abused. This is not a flaw in freedom (else police states might be more desirable) but a flaw in humanity.

Zach Weinersmith

#15. The guy you don't see will kill you.

Robin Olds

#16. The proper condition of the human is not bovine placidity ... the highest degree of tension that can be creatively borne.

Brian Swimme

#17. There are pilots and there are pilots; with the good ones, it is inborn. You can't teach it. If you are a fighter pilot, you have to be willing to take risks.

Robin Olds

#18. Oh," I thought, "without a doubt, everything in my life is falling to pieces. Nothing that my hand grasps can my hand hold.

Andre Gide

#19. A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.

C.S. Lewis

#20. All her life she had made her own mistakes and her own successes, both usually by trying what others said she could not do.

Vonda N. McIntyre

#21. Thou knowest not the endless artifices of a court. Invented crimes are often there alleged; but real ones, and those especially, which may offend his pride, are oftentimes not to a king divulged.

Vittorio Alfieri