Bicycles Quotes

Anathema didn't only believe in ley-lines, but in seals, whales, bicycles, rainforests, whole grain in loaves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island. She didn't compartmentalize her beliefs. They were welded into one enormous, seamless belief, compared with which that held by Joan of Arc seemed a mere idle notion. ~ Terry Pratchett

My name's Alis K. From now on you will be Willy. Come on, let's push the bicycles for a bit."

Ingrid aka 'Alis K'
The Informer ~ Steen Langstrup

I believed that old people never laughed. I thought they sighed a lot and groaned. They walked with sticks, and they didn't like children on bicycles or roller skates ... or with big dogs. ~ Maeve Binchy

I am in a car with Mr. Assai at the wheel. He pauses to let a cow cross the road and then manages to ease in and out of people and bicycles and rickshaws. I look at his hand gripping the stick shift. I have never learned to drive a vehicle though I have seen men driving on buses. I always like to see what people's hands do while their eyes are on something else.
When I carve, I must look at my subject, but every now and again, when I have done something so many times, I can look away while my hands continue working. I can look away and forget I am a slave to this piece of stone. Even if it is becoming a beautiful angel with outstretched wings.
How can I love the stone and hate it at the same time? Because it is a piece of me. I know nothing else. How can the ox stand having the yoke put upon its neck day after day after day? Because it is all it has ever known. Nothing more, nothing less. ~ Nicole A. Seitz

Every morning when I wake up and look in the mirror, I see a black face and I love it. Sure, I've been to Paris and grew up surfing, and yes, I speak like I'm in a commercial. But I'm just like the women you see walking on the side of the road with their laundry baskets and their Bibles. I'm just like the old men pedaling their rusty bicycles. I'm no different from the men who drive your tractors or the woman who probably raised you. I'm just like them, no better and no worse. I'm black, Remy, which means everything and nothing ~ Natalie Baszile

Here she was at eight, with the chemistry set she'd begged for at Christmas. Her father was beside her in this one, showing her a picture of the periodic table, explaining how everything on earth, everything in the universe, even - people, starfish, cement, bicycles, and far-off planets - was made up of a combination of these elements. "Isn't it amazing to think of, Ruthie?" he'd asked. Ruthie had found the idea that we were only a series of neatly constructed puzzle pieces or building blocks vaguely unsettling - even at eight, she wanted there to be more to it than that. ~ Jennifer McMahon

Vashon is an island, accessible by ferry from Seattle, mainly populated by NIMBY-ish hippies, NIMBY-ish yuppies, boutique farmers, and wizards riding recumbent bicycles. A full quarter of the children in Vashon schools are unvaccinated. ~ Lindy West

Having made a few bicycles in factories, having written some thousands of rather senseless advertisements, having rubbed affectionately the legs of a few race horses, having tried blunderingly to love a few women and having written a few novels that did not satisfy me or anyone else, having done these few things, could I begin now to think of myself as tired out and done for? Because my own hands had for the most part served me so badly could I let them lie beside me in idleness? ~ Sherwood Anderson

If you had a carbon tax, you'd have less cars and more bicycles, more people getting around on foot and by public transport. ~ Richard Rogers

If constellations had been named in the 20th century, I suppose we would see bicycles. ~ Carl Sagan

As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars. ~ James Gleick

The children all received their bicycles at Nine; they were not allowed to ride bicycles before then. ~ Lois Lowry

The house had a private walk down to a private spit of beach, and in the mornings the four of them would troop downhill and swim - even he did, in his pants and undershirt and an old oxford shirt, which no one bothered him about - and then lie on the sand baking, the wet clothes ungluing themselves from his body as they dried. Sometimes Harold would come and watch them, or swim as well. In the afternoons, Malcolm and JB would pedal off through the dunes on bicycles, and he and Willem would follow on foot, picking up bits of shaley shells and the sad carapaces of long-nibbled-away hermit crabs as they went, Willem slowing his pace to match his own. In the evenings, when the air was soft, JB and Malcolm sketched and he and Willem read. He felt doped, on sun and food and salt and contentment, and at night he fell asleep quickly and early, and in the mornings he woke before the others so he could stand on the back porch alone looking over the sea. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

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. ~ H.G.Wells

But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody. There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them. ~ George Orwell

In 1895, Ann Strong declared in the Minneapolis Tribune that bicycles were "just as good company as most husbands" and that when a bicycle gets shabby or old a woman could "dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community. ~ Frances E. Willard

Why shouldn't it be that way for the rest of us? Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn't know it could be that easy. I didn't know that until just now. That sounds good to me. ~ Joshua Ferris

He drove past a couple of communal basketball hoops and some black and Latino kids on bicycles, who stopped and stared until he was gone. School had been out for a couple of weeks. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

One of the greatest myths in the world - & the phrase 'greatest myths' is just a fancy way of saying 'big fat lies'
is that troublesome things get less & less troublesome if you do them more & more. People say this myth when they are teaching children to ride bicycles, for instance, as though falling off a bicycle & skinning your knee is less troublesome the fourteenth time you do it than it is the first time. The truth is that troublesome things tend to remain troublesome no matter how many times you do them, & that you should avoid doing them unless they are absolutely urgent. ~ Lemony Snicket

Anybody who's spent any time with machines at all,' he added, 'and baby, that's us all, knows first and foremost there's only one thing certain about them, computer or bicycle. They go wrong. ~ Salman Rushdie

Nature loves bicycle because no harm to nature comes from the bicycle! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

During our visit, we noticed she was mixing up words. She started referring to Muslims as Mormons. After 9/11, she told Jon and me how it was important for America to stop the radical Mormons because they had perpetrated the attacks on the Twin Towers.
There was no way we could convince her of the difference. We'd just smile and not. That's right, Grandma, all the Mormons got together on September 11th and ran their bicycles into the Twin Towers! ~ Mollie Gross

The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles ... when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones. ~ Flann O'Brien

like the small votives they lit in church.) Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed. Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower. ~ Alice McDermott

There was something about clowns that was worse than zombies. (Or maybe something that was the same. When you see a zombie, you want to laugh at first. When you see a clown, most people get a little nervous. There's the pallor and the cakey mortician-style makeup, the shuffling and the untidy hair. But clowns were probably malicious, and they moved fast on those little bicycles and in those little crammed cars. Zombies weren't much of anything. They didn't carry musical instruments and they didn't care whether or not you laughed at them. You always knew what zombies wanted.) ~ Kelly Link

I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living. ~ James Cameron

Over the years, I bought a trailer -- and then a cargo bike -- and then a trailer for the cargo bike -- and that's when things got really out of hand. I've moved a full size bed and frame (with a friend riding on top of the bed), a drafting table, a sleeper sofa, my dog, another bicycle and its rider, a load of twelve foot long 2x4s, and half a garden's worth of plants. ~ Elly Blue

Bicycles are the most efficient vehicles on the planet, 50 times more efficient than cars, and twice as efficient as walking. ~ Godo Stoyke

As his boots walked towards the old station, he felt as though he were hallucinating. Scary apprehension increased the beat of his heart and the sweat upon his forehead was cold. The reality of where he stood created a sinking feeling inside of him.
An old man everyone called Uncle Tucker once owned this place. His sole existence behind the counter all of the time, day and night. He could have been a creature out of a fairy tale, with his long white beard and equally long white hair. Merlin. The overalls and the ball cap perched upon his head, along with the half-smoked cigar with an endless burning orb positioned in his mouth. It made him a fixture in time. He wondered if Tucker would still be alive. Tucker with his endless stories of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and flower children. A man that never left a country thousands of miles away where bicycles filled the capital. A man who never left those fields where killing occurred. ~ Jaime Allison Parker

Summer in England THOSE WORDS ARE SUPPOSED TO CONJURE UP HALCYON SUNNY afternoons; the smell of new-mown hay, little old ladies on bicycles pedaling past the village green on their way to the church jumble sale, the vicar's tea party, the crunching sound of a fast-bowled cricket ball fracturing the batsman's skull, and so on. ~ Charles Stross

The vague yet menacing government agency would like to remind you that UFOs are totally not a thing. They remind you that UFOs are merely weather balloons, and further, that weather balloons are merely misplaced clouds, that clouds are merely dreams that have escaped our sleep, that sleep is merely a practice for death, that death is merely another facet of our world, no different from, say, sand or bicycles, and that the great glowing earth is merely the last thoughts of a dying man, laughing and shaking his head weakly at the improbability of it all. Remember, it's not just the law. It's an ~ Joseph Fink

To me the bicycle is in many ways a more satisfactory invention than the automobile. It is consonant with the independence of man because it works under his own power entirely. There is no combustion of some petroleum product..to set the pedals going. Purely mechanical instruments like watches and bicycles are to be preferred to engines that depend on the purchase of power from foreign sources ... The price of power is enslavement. ~ Louis J. Halle

Bicycles are almost as good as guitars for meeting girls. ~ Bob Weir

Kandinski looked up. 'Do you read science fiction?' he asked matter-of-factly.
'Not as a rule,' Ward admitted. When Kandinski said nothing he went on: 'Perhaps I'm too skeptical, but I can't take it too seriously.'
Kandinski pulled at a blister on his palm. 'No one suggests you should. What you mean is that you take it too seriously.'
Accepting the rebuke with a smile at himself, Ward pulled out one of the magazines and sat down at a table next to Kandinski. On the cover was a placid suburban setting of snugly eaved houses, yew trees, and children's bicycles. Spreading slowly across the roof-tops was an enormous pulpy nightmare, blocking out the sun behind it and throwing a weird phosphorescent glow over the roofs and lawns. 'You're probably right,' Ward said, showing the cover to Kandinski. 'I'd hate to want to take that seriously.'
("The Venus Hunters") ~ J.G. Ballard

In Copenhagen, there's a long-term commitment to creating a well-functioning pedestrian city where all forms of movement - pedestrian, bicycles, cars, public transportation - are accommodated with equal priority. ~ Bjarke Ingels

We are a nation that worships speed and power. And for good reason. Without power we would still be part of England and everybody would be out of work ... Bicycles are too slow and impuissant for a nation like ours. They belong in Czechoslovakia. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Women need men like fish need bicycles, ~ Irina Dunn

I moved from Moscow to Rome with my family and two bicycles in 1998, and spent a lot of that year- and the next - obsessed, I am sorry to admit, with the bicycles. Italy, after all, was a place where thousands of middle-aged men felt perfectly comfortable spending many hours a week in brightly colored spandex. ~ Michael Specter

Bicycles are pieces of art. You get that combination of kinetic engineering, but then, besides the welds, the paint jobs, the kind of the sculpture of it all is quite beautiful. Bikes have such great lines, and all different styles. ~ Robin Williams

umbrellas, Scotch whiskey, bicycles, balloons... ~ Marty Asher

Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke-smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals. ~ Albert Camus

No matter what she did with her hair it took about three minutes for it to tangle itself up again, like a garden hosepipe in a shed [Which, no matter how carefully coiled, will always uncoil overnight and tie the lawnmower to the bicycles]. ~ Terry Pratchett

Do you think that horrible servant girl will get my body pregnant?' she asked as we trotted down the steps. 'I've heard about you girl orphans having no morals and having babies for fun and selling them to buy bicycles and fashion accessories and onions and stuff. ~ Jasper Fforde

Cyling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world ~ Susan B. Anthony

When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man's convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man's brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others. Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle. ~ Elizabeth West

And you would be unutterably flibbergasted if you knew the number of stout bicycles that partake serenely of humanity. ~ Flann O'Brien

Are you chuckling yet? Because then along came you. A big, broad meat eater with brash blond hair and ruddy skin that burns at the beach. A bundle of appetites. A full, boisterous guffaw; a man who tells knock know jokes. Hot dogs - not even East 86th Street bratwurst but mealy, greasy big guts that terrifying pink. Baseball. Gimme caps. Puns and blockbuster movies, raw tap water and six-packs. A fearless, trusting consumer who only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives. A fan of the open road with a passion for his pickup who thinks bicycles are for nerds. Fucks hard and talks dirty; a private though unapologetic taste for porn. Mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction; a subscription to National Geographic. Barbecues on the Fourth of July and intentions, in the fullness of time, to take up golf. Delights in crappy snack foods of ever description: Burgles. Curlies. Cheesies. Squigglies - you're laughing - but I don't eat them - anything that looks less like food than packing material and at least six degrees of separation from the farm. Bruce Springsteen, the early albums, cranked up high with the truck window down and your hair flying. Sings along, off-key - how is it possible that I should be endeared by such a tin ear?Beach Boys. Elvis - never lose your roots, did you, loved plain old rock and roll. Bombast. Though not impossibly stodgy; I remember, you took a shine to Pearl Jam, which was exactly when Kevin went off them...(sorry). It just had to be no ~ Lionel Shriver

I always was fascinated with China, because I was born in Europe, and for us, China had this fascination and mystery. The first time I came here was in 1989. They were on bicycles, and the speed of the growth has been incredible. ~ Diane Von Furstenberg

It is an oyster, with small shells clinging to its humped back. Sprawling and uneven, it has the irregularity of something growing. It looks rather like the house of a big family, pushing out one addition after another to hold its teeming life - here a sleeping porch for the children, and there a veranda for the play-pen; here a garage for the extra car and there a shed for the bicycles. It amuses me because it seems so much like my life at the moment, like most women's lives in the middle years of marriage. It is untidy, spread out in all directions, heavily encrusted with accumulations ... ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We must plant trees, grow gardens instead of lawns, ride bicycles when we can and support responsible local businesses over big brands. ~ Bryant McGill

Lending one's bicycle is a form of safe sex, possibly the safest there is. ~ Tom Stoppard

It has been explained to me that toys are packaged in shards, to be assembled by the middle-aged and butter-fingered, because this makes it easier for the shippers ... If they had to spend hours and hours putting handlebars onto bicycles ... they would repent their ways and deliver something that looked like a rocking horse and not like the result of a small street accident. ~ Jean Kerr

Simon, you're blushing," observed Jace. "And you're a vampire and almost never blush, so this better be really juicy. And weird. Were bicycles involved in some kinky way? Vacuum cleaners? Umbrellas? ~ Cassandra Clare

Social media is not just a spoke on the wheel of marketing. It's becoming the way entire bicycles are built. ~ Ryan Lilly

Want loud and messy and crazy. I want crayons on the wall and bicycles in the driveway and playing ball in the backyard. I want to teach my kids to read and climb trees and drive a standard. I want noise and laughter and yelling and the kind of love that can't ever be broken. ~ Shannon Stacey

When I see a room full of people pedaling away on stationary bikes, I fall into an existential spiral. It's confirmation that all we do as humans is pedal, pedal, pedal, and go nowhere. We're just specks of dust in the universe, riding 1970s stationary bicycles. ~ Ali Liebegott

Can you understand why the Congress, most states and most cities refuse to pass legislation requiring the registration and licensing of any and all guns? For the life of me, I can't. We must register our cars and be licensed to drive. In many places we must get licenses for dogs and even bicycles. Being required to register firearms and show the competence and capacity to handle them hardly seems unreasonable, hardly seems an infringement of freedom. What is it that blocks such legislation? Why do they block it? How are they able to block it? ~ Malcolm Forbes

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
I really hate this expression. I bet fish would totally want bicycles. ~ Meg Cabot

Buttressing this argument (that you can prevent children from learning to read or ride bicycles but you can't stop them from learning to talk), Chomsky had pointed to two other universals in human language: that its emergence in children follows a very precise timetable of development, no matter where they live or which particular language is the first they learn; and that language itself has an innate structure. Chomsky has recently reminded audiences that the origins of the structure of language - how semantics and syntax interact - remain as "arcane" as do its behavioral and neurologic roots. Chomsky himself finds nothing in classical Darwinism to account for human language.* And for that reason, says Plotkin, linguistics is left with a major theoretical dilemma. If human language is a heritable trait but one that represents a complete discontinuity from animal communicative behavior, where did it come from? ~ Frank R. Wilson

This was the very role of the bicycles that wheeled over this same topography Just as seawater defined the tidal lands, the bicycles revealed America's economic and social systems by floating though its bloodstream and coloring-with sparkling chrome, metallic paints, a whir of spokes and flicker of handlebar ribbons-the murkiest corners and furthest reaches. ~ Kimball Taylor

Peoples are like bicycles. They can keep their balance only as long as they keep moving ~ Albert Einstein

You could drive around the island of Tahiti in two hours, in a day, in two days. You could pass the slower cars, the pick-up trucks with their loads of mothers and kids in ragged T-shirts, the bicycles turning in lazy circles by the side of the road, the bony yellow dogs trying to cross – if you never stopped, the drive could take less than two hours, provided that you weren't entering or leaving Papeete during the morning or late afternoon traffic jams. At the other extreme, you could visit every relative living around the island – your aunt who ran the general store in Papeari, your uncle who worked at the gas station in Mahina, your countless cousins who were expecting babies or who had just given birth, your grandmother who lived with your aunt who lived with your great-aunt...this type of tour de l'ile could take an entire day or two or three days. ~ Lillian Howan

I think the most difficult thing in teaching, as well as the most interesting, is to get the children to tell you their real thoughts about things. One stormy day last week I gathered them around me at dinner hour and tried to get them to talk to me just as if I were one of themselves. I asked them to tell me the things they most wanted. Some of the answers were commonplace enough... dolls, ponies, and skates. Others were decidedly original. Hester Boulter wanted 'to wear her Sunday dress every day and eat in the sitting room.' Hannah Bell wanted 'to be good without having to take any trouble about it.' Marjorie White, aged ten, wanted to be a 'widow'. Questioned why, she gravely said that if you weren't married people called you an old maid, and if you were your husband bossed you; but if you were a widow there'd be no danger of either. The most remarkable wish was Sally Bell's. She wanted a 'honeymoon.' I asked her if she knew what it was and she said she thought it was an extra nice kind of bicycle because her cousin in Montreal went on a honeymoon when he was married and he had always had the very latest in bicycles! ~ L.M. Montgomery

My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library. ~ Peter Golkin

The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

My toys were those of a boy: skates, bicycles. ~ Frida Kahlo

your second-hand bicycles in the alleyways ~ John Altman

When I was 14, I did all kinds of different odd jobs. I had a chicken farm, had an ice cream operation in the summertime, worked as a caddy; all things to make money and save money. Save money in order to invest - that was the first step, though I never really accumulated very much because of other demands like bicycles and things like that. ~ Charles Schwab

They'd eaten every meal outdoors, hard-boiled eggs and cheese from a picnic basket, and drunk wine under the lilac tree in the walled garden. They'd disappeared inside the woods, and stolen apples from the farm next door, and floated down the stream in her little boat as one silken hour spun itself into the next. On a clear, still night, they'd dug the old bicycles out of the shed and cycled together along the dusty lane, racing, laughing, breathing in salt from the warm air as moonlight made the stones, still hot from the day, shine lustrous white. ~ Kate Morton

As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship? ~ David Ogilvy

For he did not, he would have said, care for women; he never felt at home or at ease with them; and that monstrous creature beginning to be talked about, the New Woman of the nineties, filled him with horror. He was a quiet, conventional person, and the world, viewed from the haven of Brookfield, seemed to him full of distasteful innovations; there was a fellow named Bernard Shaw who had the strangest and most reprehensible opinions; there was Ibsen, too, with his disturbing plays; and there was this new craze for bicycles which was being taken up by women equally with men. Chips did not hold with all this modern newness and freedom. He had a vague notion, if he ever formulated it, that nice women were weak, timid, and delicate, and that nice men treated them with a polite but rather distant chivalry. ~ James Hilton

The obituary writers drew their incomplete sketches, touring through his life like travelers to England who do not ever see swans, sheep, bicycles, and blue eyes. ~ Mark Helprin

Kids ought to have two bicycles, one to ride and one to rent. ~ Jim Rohn

People will pay any price for motion. They will even work for it. Look at bicycles. ~ William Faulkner

Believe me, a highly strung brain such as yours demands occasional relaxation from the strain of domestic surroundings. Forget for a little while that children want music lessons, and boots, and bicycles, with tincture of rhubarb three times a day; forget there are such things in life as cooks, and house decorators, and next-door dogs, and butchers' bills. Go away to some green corner of the earth, where all is new and strange to you, where your over-wrought mind will gather peace and fresh ideas. Go away for a space and give me time to miss you, and to reflect upon your goodness and virtue, which, continually present with me, I may, human-like, be apt to forget, as one, through use, grows indifferent to the blessing of the sun and the beauty of the moon. Go away, and come back refreshed in mind and body, a brighter, better man - if that be possible - than when you went away. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine - and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When ~ Yann Martel

The first day we rode our bikes to Chelsey and parked them. It was a terrible feeling. Most of those kids, at least all the older ones, had their own automobiles, many of them new convertibles, and they weren't black or dark blue like most cars, they were bright yellow, green, orange, and red. The guys sat in them outside of the school and the girls gathered around and went for rides. Everybody was nicely dressed, the guys and the girls, they had pullover sweaters, wrist watches and the latest in shoes. They seemed very adult and poised and superior. And there I was in my homemade shirt, my one ragged pair of pants, my rundown shoes, and I was covered with boils. The guys with the cars didn't worry about acne. They were very handsome, they were tall and clean with bright teeth and they didn't wash their hair with hand soap. They seemed to know something I didn't know. I was at the bottom again.

Since all the guys had cars Baldy and I were ashamed of our bicycles. We left them home and walked to school and back, two-and-one-half miles each way. We carried brown bag lunches. But mot of the other students didn't even eat in the school cafeteria. They drove to malt shops with the girls, played the juke boxes and laughed. They were on their way to U.S.C. ~ Charles Bukowski

Bicycles, bullock carts, and buses that belched thick, black smoke moved in anarchic streams with the auto rickshaws and cars along the streets. Many of the shops - normally selling everything from groceries to stainless steel cookware to shoes - stood silent behind shutters and honeycomb grilles. ~ Ken Doyle

I didn't need to follow these particular bicycles anymore.They'd found their rightful place. They'd descended through the seven rings of fire--of importation, sale, impoundment, auction, contraband, confiscation, and donation--and here they were again in the hands of fresh new cyclist. It was as if the bikes had graduated from weird times on the traveling freak show, having filled the roles of the reptile man, the fire-eater, the sword-swallower, and now in retirement they'd become staid, calm, dutiful, and serviceable again--like postal workers, customs clerks, and crosswalk guards with colorful, secret pasts. ~ Kimball Taylor

Mr. Speaker, less than 10 percent of our Nation's children walk or ride their bicycles to school, and too many schools continue to invite fast-food vendors into their cafeterias. ~ Lois Capps

Occasionally the poster pictures a pair of cyclists; and then one grasps the fact how much superior for purposes of flirtation is the modern bicycle to the old-fashioned parlour or the played-out garden gate. He and she mount their bicycles, being careful, of course, that such are of the right make. After that they have nothing to think about but the old sweet tale. Down shady lanes, through busy towns on market days, merrily roll the wheels of the "Bermondsey Company's Bottom Bracket Britain's Best," or of the "Camberwell Company's Jointless Eureka." They need no pedalling; they require no guiding. Give them their heads, and tell them what time you want to get home, and that is all they ask. While Edwin leans from his saddle to whisper the dear old nothings in Angelina's ear, while Angelina's face, to hide its blushes, is turned towards the horizon at the back, the magic bicycles pursue their even course. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

It's easy to get carried away in the search for "experience." I think that people boast of "experience" as if all experience is good. The whole world will tell you that all mistakes are good and all experiences are worthwhile. Nevertheless, I believe in an equilibrium. I always say "throw yourself out there" but at the same time, I want to tell you, that there are so many experiences in life that you're better off not experiencing. Experience is not always a positive thing, it can affect a person in such a way that it is like finding a tulip trampled under foot, run over by bicycles and spit on. And then the tulip is set on a windowsill for sale with a sign that says "I have had so much experience, that's why I'm more expensive." But the truth is, there's nothing wrong with being that tulip in the field, untouched and caressed by moonlight. Yes, we have the choice to make mistakes, but we also have the choice to choose what things we allow in to make marks upon our lives. It is okay to be untouched by darkness. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Between the roof of the shed and the big plant that hangs over the fence from the house next door I could see the constellation Orion. People say that Orion is called Orion because Orion was a hunter and the constellation looks like a hunter with a club and a bow and arrow, like this:

But this is really silly because it is just stars, and you could join up the dots in any way you wanted, and you could make it look like a lady with an umbrella who is waving, or the coffeemaker which Mrs. Shears has, which is from Italy, with a handle and steam coming out, or like a dinosaur.

And there aren't any lines in space, so you could join bits of Orion to bits of Lepus or Taurus or Gemini and say that they were a constellation called the Bunch of Grapes or Jesus or the Bicycle (except that they didn't have bicycles in Roman and Greek times, which was when they called Orion Orion). And anyway, Orion is not a hunter or a coffeemaker or a dinosaur. It is just Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and Alnilam and Rigel and 17 other stars I don't know the names of. And they are nuclear explosions billions of miles away. And that is the truth.

I stayed awake until 5:47. That was the last time I looked at my watch before I fell asleep. It has a luminous face and lights up if you press a button, so I could read it in the dark. I was cold and I was frightened Father might come out and find me. But I felt safer in the garden because I was hidden. I looked at the sky a lot. I ~ Mark Haddon

If, during the Second World War, the United States had retooled its factories for manufacturing bicycles instead of munitions, we'd be one of the healthiest, least oil-dependent, and most environmentally-sound constituents in the Nazi empire today. ~ Ralph Nader

First Nations and science fiction don't usually go together. In fact, they could be considered rather unusual topics to mention in the same sentence, much like fish and bicycles.... To me, sci-fi was a world of possibilities. As a fan of writing, why shouldn't my fascination extend to such unconventional works? It was still writing, still literature in all its glory, but here they used different tools to explore the human condition, be they aliens, advanced technology, or other such novel approaches.... I wanted to take traditional (a buzzword in the Native community) science-fiction characteristics and filter them through an Aboriginal consciousness. ~ Drew Hayden Taylor

Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn't know it could be that easy. I didn't know that until just now. That sounds good to me. I think I might be able to do that. Who couldn't do that? It would take somebody mentally ill not to do that, and I'm not mentally ill. ~ Joshua Ferris

Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There's something wrong with a society that drives a car to work out in a gym. ~ Bill Nye

The "herrenvolk" [master race] are all around you, threading their way on their bicycles between the piles of rubble or rushing off with jugs and buckets to meet the water cart. It is queer to think that these are the people who once ruled Europe, from the Channel to the Caspian Sea and might have conquered our own island, if they had known how weak we were. ~ George Orwell

We parked our bikes on verges so they could graze. ~ Roddy Doyle

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. ~ Christopher Morley

There is comfort in such accumulations, layers of lives, of years. Gardening tools, wheelbarrow, arousal cans, old bicycles, recycling bins, battered trash cans, cardboard boxes stacked in a corner, cracked clay pots, exiled kitchenware & furniture, antique television, dog food bowls. You could do an inventory of a household by all that has been worn out or excluded, exiled from it. You could do an inventory of a life. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I want London to be the most cycle-friendly city on Earth, and I want more people to be happy and safe on bicycles. ~ Boris Johnson

And though history sadly doesn't credit the man who first thought of tilting a bicycle's steering axis, it is more likely to be because of feet striking the wheel than an understanding of stability. ~ Robert Penn

People with more money than time buy $3,000 road racing bicycles with ultralight carbon frames to shave two pounds off the bike, regardless of the fact that they themselves are probably at least 10 pounds overweight. ~ Jacob Lund Fisker

The best find hadn't been in the bunker, though. The garage had a half-dozen unused but well-maintained bicycles, complete with saddlebags. Even ~ James S.A. Corey

First dentistry was painless.
Then bicycles were chainless,
Carriages were horseless,
And many laws enforceless.
Next cookery was fireless,
Telegraphy was wireless,
Cigars were nicotineless,
And coffee caffeineless.
Soon oranges were seedless,
The putting green was weedless,
The college boy was hatless,
The proper diet fatless.
New motor roads are dustless,
The latest steel is rustless,
Our tennis courts are sodless,
Our new religion
godless. ~ Arthur Guiterman

Fail is a verb not a noun, most people think that when they fail, they become a noun and call themselves failures. People have to learn from their mistakes just as children learn to ride bicycles by falling off bicycles. Mistakes can be priceless if we are willing to learn from them because the price to becoming rich is the willingness to make mistakes and learn from them without blaming or justifying ~ Robert Kiyosaki

April 19
And now it is spring. Birds are singing. Wistful notes and jubilant. And bare streets and no need for coats, and skipping ropes and bicycles and a thin new moon. ~ Elizabeth Smart

My dad only ever talked about two things: bicycles and Mercedes. ~ Raf Simons

In Copenhagen, we all ride bicycles everywhere, partly because it is impossible to park a car, but also because you can cross the city in 20 minutes on a bike. ~ Birgitte Hjort Sorensen