I Dream on Two Wheels

I call her Green, and she is the best thing I've ever seen.  When I found her, I immediately knew she was the one I had always wanted.  I feel so fortunate to have my friend, my ride, my classic, single-speed beauty.  She cruises from on high, strong as a tank, agile as a hawk.  She keeps me feeling free.  She fits me perfectly, as if she was custom designed to my specs.  She is so fast and easy....I swear she helps me up hills.  I take care of her as one would a Rolls Royce.  She takes so little, and gives so much.

My utopia is full of beautiful bicycles with happy riders smiling at one another.  Everybody knows that bicycling is great for our planet, but that's not the only reason biking helps preserve Mama Earth.  Bicycling is also great for our hearts, wallets, community, children, smiles, lungs, attitudes, figures, joints, muscles, brains, sex lives, self-esteem, sleep, and souls!  That makes us better human beings, and therefore better stewards of mothership earth.

I love how biking makes me feel calm and excited at once.  Biking always gives me a fresh perspective.  Biking gives me wings!  Add an iPod to the mix, and the experience becomes downright sacred magic.  The freshness and freedom transforms me into a goddess on two wheels, spinning for love and peace.

Cycling puts me directly in touch with my surroundings, outside the bubble.  I can fully appreciate and interact with my surroundings, without deteriorating them.  I love to enjoy scenic tours with my nose, ears and eyes.  I adore hitting pockets of scents and sounds from life as we know it.  On a bike it is so easy to slow or stop to share kindness, laughs, and give praise.  I encounter fine folks I would not otherwise.

My motivation and energy determine how fast I travel.  The weather determines what I wear.  I love to bicycle in all different seasons, conditions, times, and speeds.  I love to spontaneously change my path.  I love the faith and awareness it takes to ride in the dark.  I love the beautiful wildlife I chance upon.  As Mark Twain said, "Get a bicycle.  You will not regret it.  If you live."  Enjoy more famous quotes about biking:

"Think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world."  ~Grant Petersen

"When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race."  ~H.G. Wells

"Bicycling has done more to emancipate woman than any one thing in the world.  It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammelled womanhood."  ~Susan B. Anthony

"Life is like riding a bicycle - in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving."  ~Albert Einstein

"Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling."  ~James E. Starrs

"A bicycle does get you there and more...  And there is always the thin edge of danger to keep you alert and comfortably apprehensive.  Dogs become dogs again and snap at your raincoat; potholes become personal. And getting there is all the fun.  ~Bill Emerson, On Bicycling, Saturday Evening Post, 29 July 1967

"For instance, the bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon."  ~Bill Strickland, The Quotable Cyclist

"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.  Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle."  ~Ernest Hemingway

"Things look different from the seat of a bike carrying a sleeping bag with a cold beer tucked inside."  ~Jim Malusa

"If you ride you know those moments when you have fed yourself into the traffic, felt the hashed-up asphalt rattle in the handlebars, held a lungful of air in a cloud of exhaust.  Up ahead there are two parallel buses.  With cat's whiskers, you measure the clearance down a doubtful alley.  You swing wide, outflank that flower truck.  The cross-street yellow light is turning red.  You burst off the green like a surfer on a wave of metal.  You have a hundred empty yards of Broadway to yourself."  ~Chip Brown, A Bike and a Prayer

"Most bicyclists in New York City obey instinct far more than they obey the traffic laws, which is to say that they run red lights, go the wrong way on one-way streets, violate cross-walks, and terrify innocents,because it just seems easier that way.  Cycling in the city, and particularly in midtown, is anarchy without malice."  ~Author Unknown

"The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets."  ~Christopher Morley

"It would not be at all strange if history came to the conclusion that the perfection of the bicycle was the greatest incident of the nineteenth century."  ~Author Unknown

"The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.  Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish.  Only the bicycle remains pure in heart."  ~Iris Murdoch

"When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments.  Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man.  And (unlike subsequent inventions for man's convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became.  Here, for once, was a product of man's brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others.  Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle."  ~Elizabeth West

"When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day's sensations:  bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay's call, ice melting, and so on.  This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamorings of work, leave all the mind theaters behind and focus on nature instead.  I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity.  But I am mentally far away from civilization.  The world is breaking someone else's heart."  ~Diane Ackerman

"The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion.  Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well."  ~Ivan Illich

"It is curious that with the advent of the automobile and the airplane, the bicycle is still with us.  Perhaps people like the world they can see from a bike, or the air they breathe when they're out on a bike.  Or they like the bicycle's simplicity and the precision with which it is made.  Or because they like the feeling of being able to hurtle through air one minute, and saunter through a park the next, without leaving behind clouds of choking exhaust, without leaving behind so much as a footstep."  ~Gurdon S. Leete

"Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride."  ~John F. Kennedy

"Ding ding, y'all!"  ~Sarah F. M. Hundley