bicycle
You get on this simple machine, you hold the handlebars, you press down on the pedals with your feet, and you go. That’s what you do, and to a boy of eight or nine, going is the thing, going is living. It is experience, art, observation. It is even religion, even if you are an atheist or think you are. As for myself, I have never had any impulse to confine myself to any such theory of disbelief. I am a believer, and my faith is enlarged by the awesome reality of the bicycle, and by the meaning of ownership and usage of the contraption, or marvel.
Foreword, The Noiseless Tenor: The Bicycle in Literature, ed. by James E. Starrs (New Jersey: Cornwall Books, 1982), 12.
Explore unfamiliar sections—on foot if wet, on bicycle, if dry.
Henry Miller on Writing (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964), 162.
After your first day of cycling one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow…
The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1897), 79.
Like many people, I’m frustrated at the round of buying stuff that is designed to be replaced quickly. I want to break the loop with this bike. I’m going to ride it for thirty years or more and I want to savor the process of acquiring it. I want the best bike I can afford, and I want to grow old with it.
It’s All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 11.
Handing over a bank-note is enough to make the bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.
Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 756.
Who climbs with toil, wheresoe’er,
Shall find wings waiting there.
“Going Down Hill on a Bicycle: A Boy’s Song,” in In a Garden: and Other Poems (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1895), 55.
I’ve been riding bicycles for thirty-six years. Today, I ride to get to work, sometimes for work, to keep fit, to bathe in air and sunshine, to go shopping, to escape when the world is breaking my balls, to savour the physical and emotional fellowship of riding with friends, to travel, to stay sane, to skip bathtime with my kids, for fun, for a moment of grace, occasionally to impress someone, to scare myself and to hear my boy laugh. Sometimes I ride my bicycle just to ride my bicycle. It’s a broad church of practical, physical, and emotional reasons with one unifying thing—the bicycle.
Its All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 11.