"We could hardly wait to get up in the morning"
About this Quote
In context, the Wrights’ breakthroughs weren’t a single Hollywood takeoff but an accumulation of early hours, cold hands, and repeated recalibration. "Hardly wait" is doing double duty: it signals joy, but also the pressure of a race against weather, materials, and the limits of their own design. The suspense here isn’t romantic; it’s procedural. When you’re close to solving controlled flight, sleep becomes an inconvenience.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the myth of the solitary genius struck by lightning. This is not an inventor posing for history; it’s a working mind addicted to iteration. The "we" matters, too. Wilbur folds Orville, their shop culture, and a kind of shared obsession into a single pronoun, hinting at invention as partnership and routine rather than heroic individuality.
There’s also an American note hiding in the plainness: ambition without ornament. A sentence this simple makes the epochal feel reachable. It suggests that progress isn’t always announced with trumpets; sometimes it starts as impatience for the next morning’s experiment.
Quote Details
| Topic | Excitement |
|---|---|
| Source | Later attribution: The Book Every Leader Needs To Read (48 Authors, 2021) modern compilationISBN: 9781776260973 · ID: XP0vEAAAQBAJ
Evidence:
... WRIGHT I didn't know Gidon Novick well - only through the work that Uber did with SA Harvest , a non - profit ... We could hardly wait to get up in the morning . – WILBUR WRIGHT We unpacked the idea more and more and saw an ... |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Wright, Wilbur. (2026, February 14). We could hardly wait to get up in the morning. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-could-hardly-wait-to-get-up-in-the-morning-108234/
Chicago Style
Wright, Wilbur. "We could hardly wait to get up in the morning." FixQuotes. February 14, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-could-hardly-wait-to-get-up-in-the-morning-108234/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We could hardly wait to get up in the morning." FixQuotes, 14 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-could-hardly-wait-to-get-up-in-the-morning-108234/. Accessed 3 Mar. 2026.








