Tag: quotation

Traditionally, an excerpt from the book The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles:

…Riding on a motorcycle can make you feel joyous, powerful, peaceful, frightened, vulnerable, and back out to happy again, perhaps in the same ten miles. It is life compressed, its own answer to the question “Why?”
Why? they ask, those who don’t ride. Those tho do ride are incapable of understanding the question. Riding feels good, they say – it feels damn good. But I think there is more, just as there is always more underneath the obvious, and a little more underneath that. The great layered mysteries of human motivation are oddly both variegated and amazingly uniform. And they are revealed in the many reasons, as well as the one simple one, why people ride.
Motorcycles are what they feel like (profoundly sensual – vroom, vroom – and perhaps a bit primordial) and also what they look like (fearsome with a strange deep beauty). Look at that engine, out for anyone to see, and those two simple wheels: what else announces its intent so brazenly?…
What bikes feel like is an extension of the self – a better you, a perfectible, fixable you, an ominously powerful you.