The Flight Attendant Quotes

“Remember that person you wanted to be? There's still time.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. —Margaret Atwood”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“a smart girl is nobody’s pushover and nobody’s foe. A smart girl is both sword and smile.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“It’s a terrible era when idiots are allowed to govern the blind,”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“She knew that most men desired her because she was attractive and she was smart, but also because she was a drunk and she was easy. This one? She hoped for his sake he wasn't as different as he seemed, because she always disappointed those men quickly or broke their hearts over time.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“Remember that person you wanted to be? There’s still time.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“, sometimes you just have to bury the dead and move on.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“Elena believed that reportage like that might be compelling and beautiful, but it would never gain traction in the Age of the Troll. In the Age of Mass Shootings. In the Age of the Suicide Bomb in the Crowd.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“You want to know the definition of a consultant? A guy who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“...The plain unvarnished reality that we cannot escape who we are and most of the time we die as we lived.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“read Carlo Levi?”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“She knew the truth of men and women and booze: it rarely ended well for either gender, but it was the women who wound up raped.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“And so—certainly not proud of herself, but not precisely disgusted either—she showered, slipped into a pair of tight, come-hither jeans and a white blouse that was perfect for the last Saturday night in July, and went out into the dark.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“a”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“sword of Damocles”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“Cassandra, Troy-born daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, knew the future, and no one believed her. At least most of the time that was what occurred. Apollo gave her the great gift of prophecy because he was confident that she was going to sleep with him; when, in the end, she refused, the god spat in her mouth, leaving behind the curse that no one would ever believe a word that she said. And so she lived with frustration and dread.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“scopaesthesia. The idea was you could sense when you were being watched. It was a cousin of scopophobia: the fear of being watched.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“She was a woman and she had spent enough time alone on subway platforms or streets late at night to know something was wrong.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“Even the most successful people in this world make mistakes. Often they’re just better at correcting them and moving on.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“Thursday night.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“Do you know people cry on airplanes more than anywhere else?” “I didn’t know it was a fact,” she answered, “but I might have suspected as much from my years up here.” “Yeah, you’d probably know better than me. But on a plane, you’re often alone. Or you’re stressed. Or you’ve just had some meaningful experience. Movies and books will really get to you at thirty-five thousand feet.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“Drones were such a guy thing, she thought. It was downright chromosomal.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“Don’t judge me. I mean that. You have a great husband and two sweet kids—” “They’re sixteen and thirteen. They stopped being sweet years ago,”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“Finally she took a breath, cringing against the spikes behind her eyes, and turned 180 degrees in the bed to face Alex. And there he was. For a split second, her mind registered only the idea that something was wrong. It may have been the body’s utter stillness, but it may also have been the way she could sense the amphibian cold. But then she saw the blood. She saw the great crimson stain on the pillow, and a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets. He was flat on his back. She saw his neck, the yawning red trench from one side of his jaw to the other, and how the blood had geysered onto his chest and up against the bottom of his chin, smothering the black stubble like honey. Reflexively, despite the pain, she threw off the sheet and leapt from the bed, retreating into those drapes against the window.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“She closed her eyes against the shame, the disgust. She tried to remind herself that this was just who she was—how she was—and to ratchet down at least a little bit the self-loathing. Hadn’t they had fun last night? Of course they had. At least she presumed they had.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“Good Lord, half of America was pretty sure their own president was a Russian puppet.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“Cassie saw another member of the flight crew approaching, a fellow a bit older than her named Justin who had pulled on a pair of blue jeans and a white oxford shirt. At least she presumed he had gotten dressed again. She wondered if he often slept naked when he traveled, like some of her friends who flew, because it meant not packing pajamas. Or maybe his body ran hot (like hers), and he liked the feel of cool sheets against his skin when he fell asleep. Maybe he liked the erotic charge. Certainly some nights she did.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“You can repair anything but dead. You can't fix that”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“She had been told over the years by pilots that the last words of most captains before their aircraft augured into the side of the mountain or broke apart before breaking the plane of the sea were these:

MOTHER. MOMMY. MOM”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

“Did you ever read Carlo Levi?” “No.” “You should—if you like Tolstoy. He wrote beautifully about Italian peasants. My people, once. He had a soul like Tolstoy. ‘The future has an ancient heart.’ I think I have that right.”
― Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant