"I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on"
About this Quote
Jean Kerr’s line lands because it treats modern aspiration the way a cat treats a closed door: with amused suspicion. By pairing airplanes with diets, she yokes two supposedly “improving” technologies-one of mobility, one of self-control-and punctures both with the same pin. The joke isn’t that planes are scary or diets are hard; it’s that the culture insists these are unquestionably good, and Kerr refuses to perform that agreement.
The syntax does most of the work. “Wonderful things” sets up a polite compliment, the kind you offer at a party when someone tells you about their cleanse or their round-the-world itinerary. Then she pivots: “for other people to go on.” That last phrase is a perfect act of comic distancing. Airplanes become something you “go on” the way you “go on” a diet: an ordeal, a program, a self-imposed regime. Travel, usually sold as liberation, is recast as compliance.
Underneath, there’s a mid-century American subtext about status and bodily discipline. The jet age and the diet industry both promised transformation: faster lives, better selves. Kerr, writing from the vantage of a sharp domestic observer, recognizes the social pressure baked into those promises. Her refusal isn’t reactionary; it’s self-protective. She’s claiming the right to opt out of a collective obsession with optimization.
It’s also a sly defense of ordinary pleasures. In one compact sentence, Kerr elevates the underrated art of staying put-and of keeping your appetite, literal and metaphorical, intact.
The syntax does most of the work. “Wonderful things” sets up a polite compliment, the kind you offer at a party when someone tells you about their cleanse or their round-the-world itinerary. Then she pivots: “for other people to go on.” That last phrase is a perfect act of comic distancing. Airplanes become something you “go on” the way you “go on” a diet: an ordeal, a program, a self-imposed regime. Travel, usually sold as liberation, is recast as compliance.
Underneath, there’s a mid-century American subtext about status and bodily discipline. The jet age and the diet industry both promised transformation: faster lives, better selves. Kerr, writing from the vantage of a sharp domestic observer, recognizes the social pressure baked into those promises. Her refusal isn’t reactionary; it’s self-protective. She’s claiming the right to opt out of a collective obsession with optimization.
It’s also a sly defense of ordinary pleasures. In one compact sentence, Kerr elevates the underrated art of staying put-and of keeping your appetite, literal and metaphorical, intact.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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