"On a plane you can pick up more and better people than on any other public conveyance since the stagecoach"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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