Biking Quotes

“Biking is about rhythm and flow. It's the wind in you face and the challenge of hammering up along hill. It's the reward at the top and the thrill of a high-speed descent. Biking lets you come alive in both body and spirit. After awhile the bike disappears beneath you and you feel as if you're suspended in midair. ”
― Gary Klein

“If a city is designed in a way that makes a long drive to work necessary, we harm the social health of that city. If a lot of people cycle, it's probably an indication that you live in a healthy neighborhood. This is something that should be seriously considered in urban planning, if you want to ensure a neighborhood togetherness and trust among locals.”
― Meik Wiking, The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living

“She had felt good for a few moments, racing across the face of the hill on her old bike, but the happy feeling had burned itself out and left behind a thin, cold rage. She was no longer entirely sure who she was angry with though. Her anger didn't have a fixed point. It was a soft whir of emotion to match the soft whir of the spokes.”
― Joe Hill

“This was the part of the road he knew best, the part his old blue Schwinn had known so well that at one time, the bike might have found its way back home without anyone riding it.”
― Seré Prince Halverson, All the Winters After

“This little piggy saved some water,
This little piggy biked for sun,
This little piggy used windmills,
This little piggy used sun,
And this little piggy squealed
'Re-re-recycle!'
All the way home.”
― Jan Peck and David Davis illustrated by Carin Berger

“Suddenly, launched in one dynamic motion, we were off, cutting like a chainsaw through the stillness of the day. The noise and the speed, ever rising, seemed to take us into another dimension where all the wind and sound in the world was our own”
― Lucy Irvine, Runaway

“Joanne had just biked fifty miles to Lowell, Massachusetts, and back.
"Is there anything special in Lowell?" Riley asked.
Joanne looked thoughtful. "There probably is," she said, hanging her bike on its special rack.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“What did I discover during my solo—besides learning to unwrap my energy bar ahead of time? That you ask yourself a lot of questions when you're alone on a bike for that long. One question more than others: Why the heck am I doing this? When I was done, I think I had found the answer: For the satisfaction that comes with pushing your body to the breaking point and conquering the unknown.”
― Matt Long, The Long Run: A New York City Firefighter's Triumphant Comeback from Crash Victim to Elite Athlete

“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

“When I graduated from college, I sought out the cheapest rooms or apartments I could find. One of these put me next to a freeway interchange in Oakland California. The experience of living there, biking everywhere and reading the book The Power Broker by Robert Caro, changed my life and made me appreciate all the issues associated with transportation. I saw exactly how and why the freeway interchange gutted my neighborhood and how the main obstacle and danger to bicycling in urban areas was cars and drivers. This was the early 1990s when many people were waking up to these same issues. I participated in some of the first Critical Mass rides in San Francisco and the East Bay and started giving them my transportation cartoons for flyers and posters. I also discovered the (now defunct) “Auto-Free Times” and Alliance for a Paving Moratorium in Arcata, California and started sending them cartoons as well. By 1994 it had become a major theme in my work.

(2015 interview with Microcosm Publishing)”
― Andy Singer

“Ride A Bike (The Sonnet)

Ride a bike 'n you get sick less,
You pay for the doctor less.
Ride a bike 'n you emit carbon less,
You pay for the gas less.
Ride a bike 'n you release endorphins,
Hence you have less stress.
Ride a bike 'n the heart pumps better,
Thus you feel exhaustion less.
Pills in need are pills indeed,
To pop pills willy-nilly is to abuse health.
Comfort in need is comfort indeed,
To abuse comfort beyond need is to abuse oneself.
Ride a bike everyday to keep the pills away.
Use pills in need but don't make them life's way.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Ingan Impossible: Handbook of Hatebusting

“Just off the roaring, high-velocity motorways and the congested main roads, there is still a leisurely, low-decibel, cyclists' England. Here, quite apart from national parks, conservation areas and other tourists' high spots is an unspectacular, intimate countryside: and it is the cyclist, himself unspectacular, not the motorist, who is best equipped to enjoy its pleasures of pub, church, market-place and cottage in all their variety of regional character.”
― Frederick Alderson, England by Bicycle

“The range and diversity of...places in England with character or charm is often overlooked. A bicycle more than anything else helps one both to find and to appreciate them: they and it have quiet tastes in common.

And a bicycle leaves no smell, oil-drip, weakened fabric or frightened pedestrian in its wake.”
― Frederick Alderson, England by Bicycle

“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking. - Arthur Conan Doyle”
― Patricia Sands, The Promise of Provence