Bruce Weber > Quotes

“The thing is, I think I like kids, more or less. I was an English teacher for a few years before I quit to enter publishing, and I enjoyed most of the work—the performing, the encouraging, the dispensing of door-opening revelations, even the wheedling and dickering you have to do with reluctant, sullen, grade-grubbing teens—but I was driven out of the classroom by the prospect of a life spent correcting papers. Maybe that reflects badly on me, makes me seem selfish or lacking in stick-to-itiveness or community spirit, or maybe it’s just evidence that I’d never have survived as a parent, with all the correcting and explaining that job entails. But believe me, you don’t even have to read sixty eighth-grade essays on To Kill a Mockingbird to suffer an unholy agony. Just carrying them around in your briefcase can bring you to tears from the anticipated tedium.”
― Bruce Weber, Life Is a Wheel: Memoirs of a Bike-Riding Obituarist

“It shouldn’t be a surprise—and it pleases me no end—that Beckett was an avid cyclist. “The bicycle is a great good,” he once wrote. “But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.”
― Bruce Weber, Life Is a Wheel: Memoirs of a Bike-Riding Obituarist

“I found the stack of letters on my desk when I got back. People really liked the idea of the trip; they found it romantic—and I think they were amused, learning where I was popping up from week to week—but I didn’t know that while it was happening. Aside from other cyclists I encountered on the road occasionally and the people I interviewed along the way, I pedaled along in pretty much total isolation”
― Bruce Weber, Life Is a Wheel: Memoirs of a Bike-Riding Obituarist

“It gave me a sudden chill to recognize what it was like without wireless technology that I can't even remember what it was like without it. One day you're a Flintstone, the next a Jetson. As we grow older we're always complaining about how fast time goes, but this made me feel as though I'd raced through the last eighteen years without noticing them.”
― Bruce Weber, Life is a Wheel: A Passage Across America by Bicycle

“Bicycling, the way I think of it, is solitary, and if it’s going to stand for anything in a narrative, it might as well be the solitary experience of being alive.”
― Bruce Weber, Life Is a Wheel: Memoirs of a Bike-Riding Obituarist