Robert Penn > Quotes

“The bicycle saves my life every day. If you've ever experienced a moment of awe or freedom on a bicycle; if you've ever taken flight from sadness to the rhythm of two spinning wheels, or felt the resurgence of hope pedalling to the top of a hill with the dew of effort on your forehead; if you've ever wondered, swooping down bird-like down a long hill, if the world was standing still; if you have ever, just once, sat on a bicycle with a singing heart and felt like an ordinary human touching the gods, then we share something fundamental. We know it's all about the bike.”
― Robert Penn

“A universal truth of bicycling is this - pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”
― Robert Penn, It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels

“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, It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”
― Robert Penn, It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels

“Lailey was immortalized by the consummate journalist and popular author H. V. Morton in his bestselling travelogue, In Search of England, published in 1927.”
― Robert Penn, The Man who Made Things out of Trees

“Ash is highly productive both when it is coppiced – the practice of cutting the tree back to ground level, to encourage regrowth – and when it is pollarded – cutting the crown back to the top of the trunk.”
― Robert Penn, The Man who Made Things out of Trees

“The great Australian cyclist Alf Goullet and his partner rode a staggering 4,442 km (2,759 miles) in the six-day event at Madison Square Garden in 1914. That’s near enough the width of the USA, from ‘sea to shining sea’. It’s 600 miles (966 km) further than the modern Tour de France, which takes three weeks. It remains the record today. Goullet wrote after the event, ‘My knees were sore, I was suffering from stomach trouble, my hands were so numb I couldn’t open them wide enough to button my collar for a month, and my eyes were so irritated I couldn’t, for a long time, stand smoke in a room.’ Note no buttaching. Goullet won fifteen six-day races including eight at Madison Square Garden. He lived to be 103.”
― Robert Penn, It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world . . . It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance . . . the moment she takes her seat, she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.”
― Robert Penn, It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels

“I remembered an Ernest Hemingway quote: ‘It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them . . . you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through.”
― Robert Penn, It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels

“It was always scary, Charlie replied, but that was why you did it, right? If it was safe... it wouldn’t be fun.”
― Robert Penn, It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels

“Wood has sensual powers that cannot be quantified. It may even be that these powers are the most important properties of wood today. Through odour, colour, resonance and warmth, we develop a sentimental attachment to artefacts made of wood that often reaches beyond their practical use. It is difficult to know exactly why we make these attachments, not least because our appreciation of such properties is so subjective. For some, touching wood engenders a feeling of safety; for others, it is a reminder of the proximity of nature; for yet others, it is about connecting to the past. Perhaps, for all of us, it is some kind of biological response. After all, we came down from the trees and for 99.9 per cent of our time on earth we have lived in natural environments: our physiological functions remain finely tuned to nature. There have been plenty of studies that have attempted to better understand the power of wood: such studies have shown that in classrooms and offices with wooden furniture, blood pressure and pulse rates tend to drop – wood is thus responsible for reducing stress levels and improving quality of sleep.”
― Robert Penn, The Man who Made Things out of Trees

“During the boom in velocipedes - known with good reason as 'boneshakers' - tyres were made of solid iron.”
― Robert Penn, It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels