Norman Mailer Quotes

One small ball in the air. I wouldn't believe that at this moment you have to fear the intelligence aspects of this.

Aerodynamics is mathematics for those who haven't learned to do calculus. In my case, too, for one who hasn't learned to add or multiply, at least the first time.

If a projectile were deprived of the force of gravity, it would not be deflected toward the earth but would go off in a straight line into the heavens and do so with uniform motion, provided that the resistance of the air were removed.

The pink ball is a bit different. I don't think it moves as much through the air.

Certainly, I want to be the first through the sound barrier in a car.

You can't chop down a symmetry

... everything in the world is a force, a pull or a push. In order for us to be pushed or pulled we need to be like a sail, like a kite in the wind. But if we have a hole in the middle of our luminosity, the force goes through it and never acts upon us.

I usually practice on a small, low wire, that features the predominant wind. I study the meteorology of the place at the time that I am supposed to do my walk, and then I find the predominant direction and velocity of the wind and I train to fight that wind.

What goes up must come down. But don't expect it to come down where you can find it.

The stone that is thrown into the air is none the worse for falling down, and none the better for going up.

Give me a few bits of wool to stick on the car, a good gust of mistral wind, and I could come up with a better aerodynamic package on the bridge at Avigon

Words, like cannon balls, should go direct to their mark.

One can get a proper insight into the practice of flying only by actual flying experiments. . . . The manner in which we have to meet the irregularities of the wind, when soaring in the air, can only be learnt by being in the air itself. . . . The only way which leads us to a quick development in human flight is a systematic and energetic practice in actual flying experiments.

It's not like there's a law against flying." "Yes there is. The law of gravity.

A fall from such a height is rarely straight downwards.

Difficulty adds to result, as the ramming of powder sends the bullet the further.

The labor of rising from the ground will be great, ... but as we mount higher, the earth's attraction, and the body's gravity, will be gradually diminished till we arrive at a region where the man will float in the air without any tendency to fall.

Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign.

We come from the mentality, that rarely sees the horror in symmetry or the beauty in non-conformity

Things fall apart, it's scientific.

Some time ago we heard a strange story. The pilot of a small plane said that he had been caught in a one hundred fifty mile gale, which held his plane perfectly still. The motor was roaring, he claimed, but the plane was not moving. "It was weird," he said , "to be going one hundred fifty miles an hour and yet not be going anywhere at all."

Weight is caused by one element being situated in another; and it moves by the shortest line towards its centre, not by its own choice, not because the centre draws it to itself, but because the other intervening element cannot withstand it.

I've told him to cut off his ponytail. I think it makes him less aerodynamic.

What goes up must come down, which is why I don't wear tube tops.

We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren't there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them.