In the air Quotes

“then things got even stranger.Mr. Brunner, who'd been out in front of the museum a minute before, wheeled his chair into the doorway of the gallery, holding a pen in his hand. "What ho, Percy!" he shouted, and tossed the pen through the air.Mrs. Dodds lunged at me.With a yelp, I dodged and felt talons slash the air next to my ear. I snatched the ballpoint pen out of the air, but when it hit my hand, it wasn't a pen anymore. It was a sword-Mr. Brunner's bronze sword, which he always used on tourement day.Mrs. Dodds spun toward me with a murderous look in her eyes.My knees were jelly. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped the sword.She snarled, "Die, honey!"And she flew straight at me.Absolute terror ran through my body. I did the only thing that came naturally:I swung the sword.The metal blade hit her shoulder and passed through her body as if she were made made of water. Hisss!Mrs. Dodds was a sand castle in a power fan. She exploded into yellow powder, vaporized on the spot, leaving nothing but the smell of sulfur and a dying screech and a chill of evil in the air, as if those two glowing red eyes were still watching me.”

“Born on the ground. Live in the air!”

“Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we’re made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life—the carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids—is by means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form the simple organic compounds that stand at the base of every food chain. It is more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air.”

“To know your ruling passion, examine your castles in the air.”

“The amorous shepherd has lost his staff,And his sheep are straying on the hillside,And he didn’t even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much.No one came to him or went away. He never found his staff again.Others, cursing at him, gathered his sheep for him.No one had loved him, in the end.When he got up from the hillside and the false truth, he saw everything:The great valleys full of the same green as always,The great distant mountains, more real than any feeling,All reality, with the sky and the air and the fields that exist, is present.(And once again the air, that he’d missed for so long, entered coolly into his lungs)And he felt that the air was opening again, but with pain, a liberty in his chest.(7/10/1930)”

“Every second in the air in Paris is art.”

“If we lose the war in the air we lose the war and we lose it quickly.”

“(There was an idea much beloved and written about by this country’s philosophers that magic had to do with negotiating the balance between earth and air and water; which is to say that things with legs or wings were out of balance with their earth element by walking around on feet or, worse, flying above the earth in the thin substance of air, obviously entirely unsuitable for the support of solid flesh. The momentum all this inappropriate motion set up in their liquid element unbalanced them further. Spirit, in this system, was equated with the fourth element, fire. All this was generally felt to be a load of rubbish among the people who had to work in the ordinary world for a living, unlike philosophers living in academies. But it was true that a favourite magical trick at fetes was for theatrically-minded fairies to throw bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers in the air and turn them into things before they struck the ground, and that the trick worked better if the bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers were wet.)Slower creatures were less susceptible to the whims of wild magic than faster creatures, and creatures that flew were the most susceptible of all. Every sparrow had a delicious memory of having once been a hawk, and while magic didn’t take much interest in caterpillars, butterflies spent so much time being magicked that it was a rare event to see ordinary butterflies without at least an extra set of wings or a few extra frills and iridescences, or bodies like tiny human beings dressed in flower petals. (Fish, which flew through that most dangerous element, water, were believed not to exist. Fishy-looking beings in pools and streams were either hallucinations or other things under some kind of spell, and interfering with, catching, or—most especially—eating fish was strictly forbidden. All swimming was considered magical. Animals seen doing it were assumed to be favourites of a local water-sprite or dangerously insane; humans never tried.)”

“If you want to go anywhere in modern war, in the air, on the sea, on the land, you must have command of the air.”