The Twenty-One Balloons Quotes

“Half of this story is true and the other half might very well have happened.”
― William Pène du Bois, The Twenty-One Balloons

“The best way of travel, however, if you aren't in any hurry at all, if you don't care where you are going, if you don't like to use your legs, if you don't want to be annoyed at all by any choice of directions, is in a balloon. In a balloon, you can decide only when to start, and usually when to stop. The rest is left entirely to nature.”
― William Pene du Bois, The Twenty-One Balloons

“It seems strange to me that mechanical progress always seems to leave the slower demands of elegance far behind.”
― William Pène du Bois, The Twenty-One Balloons

“That's the peculiar thing about nature," explained Mr. F., "it guards it's rarest treasures with greatest care.”
― William Pène du Bois, The Twenty-One Balloons

“Each family was required to have two things in order to be chosen. They had to have: a) one boy and one girl between the ages of three and eight; and b) they had to have definite creative interests, such as interests in painting, writing, the sciences, music, architecture, medicine. These two requirements would not only assure future generations of Krakatoa citizens; but also he assumed that people with creative interests are not liable to be too bored on a small desolate island; and people with inventive interests can more easily cope with unusual situations and form a stronger foundation for a cultured heredity.”
― William Pène du Bois, The Twenty-One Balloons

“Professor of, uh, Aeronautics,” I stuttered. “I teach Balloon Theory at, uh, the San Francisco Lighter than Air School.”
― William Pène du Bois, The Twenty-One Balloons

“crystallized”
― William Pène du Bois, The Twenty-One Balloons