Cycling Quotes

“Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living!...Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you're going to smash up. Well, now, that's something! And then go home again after three hours of it...and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!”
― Jack London

“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

“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.”
― Ernest Hemingway, By-Line: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades

“The Rider

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, Fuel: Poems

“You know, bicycling isn't just a matter of balance," I said. "it's a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. I'm going to call that the Bicyclist's Philosophy of Life.”
― Susan Vreeland, Clara and Mr. Tiffany

“Gliding down the bike path on a Saturday morning, you whip by somebody peddling in the opposite direction and give each other a nod. For a moment it's like "Hey, we're both doing the same thing. Let's be friends for a second.”
― Neil Pasricha, The Book of Awesome

“Your bike is discovery; your bike is freedom. It doesn't matter where you are, when you're on the saddle, you're taken away.”
― Doug Donaldson

“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

“I had to ride my bike to and from their god damn plant way up north in the high-chemical crime district, and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers struggled by.”
― Neal Stephenson, Zodiac

“Road racing imitates life, the way it would be without the corruptive influence of civilization. When you see an enemy lying on the ground, what's your first reaction? To help him to his feet.
In road racing, you kick him to death.”
― Tim Krabbé, The Rider

“Meyrueis, Lozère, June 26, 1977. Hot and overcast. I take my gear out of the car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafés. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.”
― Tim Krabbé, The Rider

“We need to change the ways in which we talk about humanity and the environment and in order to do so, we need to change the way in which we think about them, not an easy task given that we use language to think and our languages make us conceive the environment as detached.

A possible way out to help us approach problems, without being drawn back by the mental models that fail us, is Systems Dynamics (Meadows 2008; Sterman 2012). Unfortunately, Sterman explains, most efforts made by individuals and institutions to enhance sustainability are directed at the symptoms and not at the causes and systems (any system) will respond to any change introduced with what is known as ‘policy resistance’, that is the existing system will tend to react to change in ways that we had not intended when we first designed the intervention (a few examples are road-building programs designed to reduce congestion that ends up increasing traffic or antibiotics that stimulate the evolution of drug-resistant pathogens—for a longer list and further explanation see Sterman 2012, 24).

Systems Dynamics allows us to calculate scientifically the way in which a complex system will react to change and to account beforehand for what we usually describe as ‘side-effects’. Side effects, Sterman argues, ‘are not a feature of reality but a sign that the boundaries of our mental models are too narrow, our time horizons too short’ (24). As Gonella et al. (2019) explain:

”As long as we consider the geobiosphere as a sub-system (a resources provider) of the human-made economic system, any attempt to fix environmental and social problems by keeping the business as usual, i.e., the mantra of economic growth, will fail. The reality tells us the reverse: geobiosphere is not a sub-system of the economy, economy is a sub-system of geobiosphere. As systems thinkers know, trying to keep alive at any cost the operation of a sub-system will give rise to a re-arrangement of the super-system – the geobiosphere – that will self-reorganize to absorb and make ineffective our attempt, then continuing its own way.” (Gonella et al. 2019)”
― M. Cristina Caimotto, Discourses of Cycling, Road Users and Sustainability: An Ecolinguistic Investigation

“No one dies listening to Enrique Iglesias”
― Chris Atkin

“My muscles were able to fit themselves to my bike, they actually liked it: muscles are tractable and learn tricks fast. But racing downhill is a matter of nerves, and from the very start my nerves have thought: to hell with you and your bicycle racing.”
― Tim Krabbé, The Rider

“Shifting is a kind of painkiller, and therefore the same as giving up. After all, if I wanted to kill my pain, why not choose the most effective method? Road-racing is all about generating pain.”
― Tim Krabbé, The Rider

“Any excuse to throw a rider out of a race is OK by me, but not that kind of inborn lack of athletic skill. That's not what racing is about.”
― Tim Krabbé, The Rider

“One of the beauties of cycling is that pedalling alone on a long, empty road allows a lot of time for protracted and uninterrupted trains of thoughts.”
― Chris Hatherly, Off The Rails

“I sympathised with the bushes and envied the driftwood.”
― Tim Cope, Off The Rails

“The distance, the endurance, isn't what
you're actually focussed on by the time
you reach the start line; instead, you're
focussed on your behaviours that'll get
you there. You'll be ready to execute the
plan, rather than just hope for the best.”
― Mark Beaumont, Endurance: How to Cycle Further

“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

“One also found there, in those days, a certain number of people learning to master bicycles. With fixed gaze and clenched jaws, they would suddenly bolt away from their teacher, shoot across the avenue, vanish into a thicket, and reappear with their machines round their necks.”
― Marcel Pagnol, My Father's Glory & My Mother's Castle: Marcel Pagnol's Memories of Childhood

“To me, cycling can be glorious and it can be grubby, but quite often, it’s neither. It’s just pedalling for hours and hours for relatively little in return.”
― The Secret Cyclist, The Secret Cyclist: Real Life as a Rider in the Professional Peloton

“If you want to know the truth about the latest equipment, don’t ask a pro. At least not one that’s speaking on the record. We’re told what to use and we have to be positive about it, even when it sucks. It’s been that way since the beginning of the sport. And while I’ve been in the game for a long time now, it is still surprising to see how bad some gear can be. I don’t know how the manufacturers stay in business.”
― The Secret Cyclist, The Secret Cyclist: Real Life as a Rider in the Professional Peloton

“It takes a special kind of person to want to be a professional cyclist. If you have another opportunity, such as university, you really have to think long and hard about it, because unless you’re very talented, you’re not going to make a fortune racing bikes.”
― The Secret Cyclist, The Secret Cyclist: Real Life as a Rider in the Professional Peloton

“Did an amateur cycling team help the company advertise its products? No, but two of the three founders of Sakonnet were cyclists, and that was a good enough reason to throw away $100,000.”
― Phil Gaimon, Pro Cycling on $10 a Day: From Fat Kid to Euro Pro

“Summary of life as an athlete: You’re training and miserable, you’re lonely, you’re training and miserable, you won something, everyone loves you, it’s over.”
― Phil Gaimon, Pro Cycling on $10 a Day: From Fat Kid to Euro Pro

“I lived in a world where, one way or another, everything was divided into things that might make me faster and things that might make me slower. Pretty much anything pleasant fell into the second category.”
― Michael Hutchinson, Faster: The Obsession, Science and Luck Behind the World's Fastest Cyclists

“The glare of the green landscape and the air, the air that was everywhere, in us and making way for us, and we rode and were aware only of each other and ourselves for those couple of miles, and for those couple of miles I was myself, back in the neighborhood of Chacarita, where I moved with my mom after we realized my dad was never going to move out first, that we would have to leave him, and I saw on either side of me the big ugly high-rises and squat goldenrod houses and fuchsia and blue and inscrutable notes scrawled on the walls, graffiti intermingling with the shimmering, shadowing little leaves of the tipas, and as I rode I slowed at the oleander at Facultad de Medicina, those delicate pink flowers that rose over the fence in utter opulence and the lush stiff leaves that reached out through the bars that were freshly painted bright green.
Then there it was: the Great Mamamushi.
I slowed, and Freddie slowed. We parked our bikes. I was out of breath and all the air on Earth was in my blood, and we kissed again, and I turned around, and he put his arms around my waist, and I leaned into him, and we beheld it: a tree that was almost too much to be true, that truly was incredible, with its trunk that was almost eight meters around, a staggering circumference, glittered over by dragonflies, heavy, petite, iridescent incarnations of Irena's genius, when suddenly a flock of impossible parrots exploded out of the alders, and we looked up to see them shattering the sky.
"All the oaks on this trail have their own names," I explained to Freddie. "This one is my favorite. Can you believe it's still growing?"
He put his face against mine. He didn't say anything. For a while we just stood like that, together, watching the Great Mamamushi grow.”
― Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey

“Riding my bike home yesterday afternoon, there was a double rainbow in the sky. It was like the best thing all day.”
― Sofia T. Romero, We Have Always Been Who We Are