Flight 232 Quotes

“What does brace mean, anyway? Brace. Such an odd word. It comes from the Latin brachium, meaning arm. It means, as its heart, to embrace. It was a hug. A hug good-bye.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

“It’s like an Irish family. They fight like hell among themselves. They want nothing to do with each other. But you throw a disaster at them, and they’re all shoulder to shoulder and they’ll do whatever it takes. They don’t stop for one minute to think what their personal cost or toll is going to be in it, they just do it.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

“Joan Wernick said she took two lessons from the crash. “You’re going to die when you’re supposed to die.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

“He saw at least a dozen people still in their seats. Their clothes were torn or blown or burned from their bodies, “completely naked in front, missing limbs, missing faces, some breathing, some moaning, and others just deader than a door nail.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

“As he walked along the runway, he came upon a United Airlines pilot. “He tried to sit up,” Martz said. “I saw a huge triangular hole in his forehead and I told him to just lie still and that help was on the way, but it was too late for him.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

“Finally, I will never forget stopping near a lovely young girl still strapped to her seat, breathing slightly. Her blouse was white, her slacks were blue. At the end of the trousers were two snow-white ankle bones where her feet used to be. I had never seen the whiteness of bones that are freshly exposed like that.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

“He listened to a fire fighter tell of a woman he had found strapped into her seat, screaming. When he cut the seat belt, she fell apart. She was being held together by the seat belt. She died at his feet.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

“Palmer had reached the field so fast that not all of the mortally wounded had died. “That’s one of the problems we had,” he said. “We were sitting there waiting for it, so they didn’t have that time to die.” For example, Palmer came upon a man who was lying on the runway. “He basically had both legs and both arms amputated. He asked me, ‘Am I gonna live?’ ” Palmer told him, “We’re gonna do what we can for you,” but he knew that he could not save the man.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

“He passed the dead in all their ranks, in all their spectral attitudes. Some lay supine, mouths open in attitudes of near ecstasy, one upon the next, embracing. Some had bowed their heads as if in deep meditation or prayer. Others had been ground to pulp against the concrete and conveyed no expression at all.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

“In the immediate aftermath of the crash, a young police officer named Pat McCann, who happened to be training at the airport that day, saw a man who had managed to get the upper half of his body through his window before the lower half was incinerated inside the plane.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

“Until I realized that I was asking myself the wrong question. I was asking myself, Why me?” She gradually realized that she could ask a different question: What do I do as a result of having had that experience? “That was the big shift: What now?” She became almost breathless as she tried to explain the changes she experienced once she had shifted from “Why me?” to “What now?”
― Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

“who had thought she was having”
― Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival