This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing the ...airy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The tourist is first of all an adventurer. The dream is of the pioneer, the explorer, the great voyager or the conquering emperor.... He leaves the security of home far behind and sets out beyond the perimeters of the known world for fame, fortune and excitement. He wants to take on the minotaur, scale the Matterhorn, discover a lost Amazonian tribe or sample the delights of a Thai brothel.... The essence of the tourist adventure is exhibited in the contours of the excitements that it provides. And these contours are best inferred from the stories that are told and re-told with animation to relatives, friends and colleagues at home. It is virtually never what has been seen that is recounted with enthusiasm. When the sites are described it is in the form of ritualized cliches: the Eiffel Tower really is a wonder--we went up it, and you get such a nice view. It is rather the personal moments of the tour, moments of near-crisis, that in retrospect were exciting: when one of the suitcases failed to arrive off the luggage chute at Frankfort Airport. Touring itself has been turned into a routine, restricting adventure to those moments when routine breaks down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason the...y don't get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat's cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to mo...ve. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycl...e.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not too many years ago, a child's experience was limited by how far he or she could ride a bicycle or by the physical boundaries t...hat parents set. Today ... the real boundaries of a child's life are set more by the number of available cable channels and videotapes, by the simulated reality of videogames, by the number of megabytes of memory in the home computer. Now kids can go anywhere, as long as they stay inside the electronic bubble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The thing to remember about fathers is, they're men. A girl has to keep it in mind:... They are dragon-seekers, bent on improbable rescues. Scratch any father, you find Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, Believing change is a threat-- Like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle It took such months to get.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »