Life & Wisdom Quote by Anita Loos

Air travel, in Anita Loos's line, isn't romance so much as a casting call with a boarding pass. She frames the airplane as the modern stagecoach: a cramped, temporary community where strangers are forced into proximity long enough to become interesting, or at least usable. The slyness is in the phrase "more and better people" - a social-climbing metric disguised as travel advice. "Better" doesn't mean kinder; it means higher on the ladder, richer in gossip, glamour, or opportunity. Loos, who made a career skewering how Americans monetize charm, is winking at the idea that transportation is also a marketplace for status.

The stagecoach comparison does double work. It invokes frontier myth - the democratic churn of travelers thrown together by necessity - then updates it with the twentieth century's new gatekeeping. Planes concentrate the "right" kind of strangers because they're expensive, aspirational, and curated by invisible rules: who can afford the ticket, who belongs in which cabin, who gets read as important. Loos is pointing at a shift in public life where chance encounters are no longer random; they're engineered by class.

There's also a modern intimacy here: the airplane as a social pressure cooker. You're sealed in a tube with no dignified exit, compelled into small talk, confession, flirtation, or observation. Loos's intent isn't to praise aviation; it's to note how quickly technology becomes etiquette, and how etiquette becomes strategy. In her world, the sky isn't freeing - it's a better-lit salon.