"I was sold on flying as soon as I had a taste for it"
About this Quote
"I was sold on flying as soon as I had a taste for it" is the kind of plainspoken line that only sounds simple until you remember who’s saying it. John Glenn isn’t describing a hobby; he’s describing an irreversible conversion. The phrasing matters. "Sold" carries the whiff of American commerce and persuasion, as if the sky itself ran a perfect pitch. It frames risk as something you can’t help but buy into once you’ve sampled it, which neatly recasts danger as desire.
"Taste" does even more work. It’s sensory and immediate, a word you use for appetite, not duty. Glenn positions flight as a craving that clicks instantly, the way some people discover speed, stage lights, or the ocean and realize they’ll spend the rest of their lives chasing that first hit. That’s the subtext: the astronaut myth isn’t built on cold heroism alone; it’s built on compulsion, on people wired to move toward the edge.
In context, Glenn’s generation grew up with aviation as the century’s new romance and its new proving ground. He came up through military flying, where exhilaration and survival shared the same cockpit. By the time NASA needed test pilots who could tolerate uncertainty and sell the public on the future, Glenn’s kind of enthusiasm wasn’t incidental - it was infrastructure. The quote quietly argues that exploration isn’t primarily a civic assignment. It’s an addiction with good PR, one that turns personal thrill into national narrative.
"Taste" does even more work. It’s sensory and immediate, a word you use for appetite, not duty. Glenn positions flight as a craving that clicks instantly, the way some people discover speed, stage lights, or the ocean and realize they’ll spend the rest of their lives chasing that first hit. That’s the subtext: the astronaut myth isn’t built on cold heroism alone; it’s built on compulsion, on people wired to move toward the edge.
In context, Glenn’s generation grew up with aviation as the century’s new romance and its new proving ground. He came up through military flying, where exhilaration and survival shared the same cockpit. By the time NASA needed test pilots who could tolerate uncertainty and sell the public on the future, Glenn’s kind of enthusiasm wasn’t incidental - it was infrastructure. The quote quietly argues that exploration isn’t primarily a civic assignment. It’s an addiction with good PR, one that turns personal thrill into national narrative.
Quote Details
| Topic | Adventure |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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