A collection of inspirational quotes, essays, and other rhetoric on the subject of motorcycles and riding...

From Neil Peart's Ghost Rider...

Parking my motorcycle in front of a motel at the end of a long day on the road could certainly be sweet, like finally exhaling after holding my breath all day, but best of all was setting out in the morning.  Whatever torments the night had brought; whatever weather the new day threw at me, when I loaded up the bike and swung my leg over the saddle, my whole perspective changed.  Focus tightened into the mechanics and mentality of operating the machine, and awareness contracted to that demanding paradigm.  As I let in the clutch and turned the throttle, my world-view expanded as I moved into a whole new paradigm of landscapes, highways, and wildlife.  Infinite possibilities.

Excerpted from Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...

You see things on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other.  In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV.  You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone.  You're completely in contact with it all.  You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.  That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.

... Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere.  Secondary roads are preferred.  Paved county roads are the best, state highways are next.  Freeways are the worst.  We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on "good" rather than "time" and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.  Twisting hilly roads are long in terms of seconds but are much more enjoyable on a cycle where you bank into turns and don't get swung from side to side in any compartment.  Roads with little traffic are more enjoyable, as well as safer.  Roads free of drive-ins and billboards are better, roads where groves and meadows and orchards and lawns come almost to the shoulder, where kids wave to you when you ride by, where people look from their porches to see who it is, where when you stop to ask directions or information the answer tends to be longer than you want rather than short, where people ask where you're from and how long you've been riding.

... We have become real secondary-road motorcycle buffs and found there are things you learn as you go.  We have learned how to spot the good ones on a map, for example.  If the line wiggles, that's good.  That means hills.  If it appears to be the main route from a town to a city, that's bad.  The best ones always connect nowhere with nowhere and have an alternate that gets you there quicker.

"The Pace" by By Nick Ienatsch

Arguably the best piece of prose ever written on the topic of street riding.  There is much to be learned from this 1991 article originally published in Motorcyclist magazine.  Link

Ienatsch's excellent follow-up piece, "Pace Yourself" was published in a 1993 edition of Motorcyclist.  Link

There is a lot of wisdom in these articles, and we would all do well to incorporate this philosophy into our riding.