What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.
The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?
Education is a continual process, it's like a bicycle. . . If you don't pedal you don't go forward.
As one does a bear riding a bicycle. One sees it so rarely. (Spoken by Volger, on Deryn)
Consumer: A person who is capable of choosing a president but incapable of choosing a bicycle without help from a government agency.
At some point my friends and I began to ask, how can a country that produced hippies and such cool people also fight a war and kill people and act cruelly? You would see American GMC trucks go by and soldiers reaching down to whack a girl riding a bicycle. They would yank at her hat and she would get thrown and she would die. You would see Americans do this and feel like they can do anything in our country. But then you'd take an English class with an American soldier from Ohio who seemed just as nice as anyone, yet he was a soldier too.
I've never designed a bicycle, so one day that would be fun to do.
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
I need NOW's defense like a fish needs a bicycle. I don't want them to defend me.
As a child growing up in pre-gentrification Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, I went everywhere by bicycle. My bike was in many ways the key to my neighborhood, which, at the time, was Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This was in the 60s and 70s, before all the white people and restaurants. I really can't underscore boldly enough the fact that I grew up in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, before it was gentrified. You could get mugged!
What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.
The bicycle is its own best argument. You just get a bike, try it; start going with the thing and using it as it suits you. It'll grow and it gets better and better and better.
It wasn't my childhood fantasy to work with Truffaut or be in obscure films. I like Midnight Run better than I like The Bicycle Thief. It was films like Die Hard and Bladerunner that made me want to be an actor.
On my twelfth birthday, I got a new bicycle as a present from my folks, and I rode it to a fair that was being held at the Columbia Gymnasium, and when I come out, my bike was gone. I was so mad I was crying, and a policeman, Joe Martin, come up and I told him I was going to whip whoever took my bike. He said I ought to take some boxing lessons to learn how to whip the thief better, and I did. That's when I started fighting.
I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.
The very existence of the bicycle is an offense to reason and wisdom.
I never learned to ride a bicycle, and it is too late now. I never learned to drive. I never learned to swim.
I've given gifts in the Tour de France and it's come back to bit me. So no gifts.
I thought of that while riding my bicycle.
