Jonathan Raban Quotes

• At night, what you see is a city, because all you see is lights. By day, it doesn't look like a city at all. The trees out-number the houses. And that's completely typical of Seattle. You can't quite tell: is it a city, is it a suburb, is the forest growing back?

  Jonathan Raban

  Night, Cities, Numbers

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• Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

  Jonathan Raban

  Travel, Book, Journey

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• Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.

  Jonathan Raban

  Distance, Reality, Scary

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• Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

  Jonathan Raban

  Presidential, Bars, Prose

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• Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn't involve any destinations. It was going to the going's sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with motion itself as the only object.

  Jonathan Raban

  Verbs, Sake, Destination

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• We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.

  Jonathan Raban

  Unique, Assessment, Self

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• Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there.

  Jonathan Raban

  White, House, President

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• In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes.

  Jonathan Raban

  Moving, Clothes, Cities

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• Seattle was built out on pilings over the sea, and at high tide the whole city seemed to come afloat like a ship lifting free from a mud berth and swaying in its chains.

  Jonathan Raban

  Cities, Sea, Mud

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• Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

  Jonathan Raban

  Art, Real, Men

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• Inaugurals conventionally start with a history lesson and finish with a prayer.

  Jonathan Raban

  Prayer, Lessons

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• Because Washington state now votes by mail, elections here tend to play out, at an agonizingly slow speed, over many days and, sometimes, weeks.

  Jonathan Raban

  Play, Washington State, Mail

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• No president has come near to rivaling Lincoln as a writer.

  Jonathan Raban

  President

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• The north-south line of 'the mountains,' meaning the Cascade Range, forty miles east of Seattle, is a rigid political frontier.

  Jonathan Raban

  Political, Mountain, Lines

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• By the end of the 1980s, Seattle had taken on the dangerous lustre of a promised city. The rumour had gone out that if you had failed in Detroit you might yet succeed in Seattle - and that if you'd succeeded in Seoul, you could succeed even better in Seattle... Seattle was the coming place. So I joined the line of hopefuls.

  Jonathan Raban

  Taken, Cities, Might

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• Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.

  Jonathan Raban

  Art, Thinking, Soul

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• The trouble with ghostwriting is that it raises the issue of whether the president is in a state of diminished responsibility for what he says. Does he actually grasp the implications of the words he speaks?

  Jonathan Raban

  Responsibility, Issues, President

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• My new city [Seattle] and its hinterland felt deceptively homely. Their similar latitude gave them the angular light and lingering evenings I was used to. Their damp marine weather, blowing in from the southwest, came in the right direction. When the mountains are hidden under a low sky, one might almost imagine oneself to be in Britain.

  Jonathan Raban

  Marine, Sky, Cities

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• When traveling, I usually keep a notebook: when home at my desk, the notebook serves mainly to remind me how little I saw at the time, or rather how I was noticing the wrong things. But the notes do spur memories, and it's the memories I trust. The wine stain on the page may tell me more than the words there, which usually strike me as hopelessly inadequate.

  Jonathan Raban

  Notebook, Memories, Home

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• It always seems to me odd to call a place a wilderness when every wilderness area in the US bristles with rules and regulations as to how you can behave, what you're allowed to do, and is patrolled by armed rangers enforcing the small print. They're parks, of course, not wildernesses at all.

  Jonathan Raban

  Regulation, Parks, Odd

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• Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers—Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams—spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland.

  Jonathan Raban

  Night, Thinking, Style

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• The mythical America?that marvellous, heroic, sentimental landwas an object of faith. It challenged you to make the believer's leap over the rude facts at your feet.

  Jonathan Raban

  America, Feet, Rude

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• There's an enduring American compulsion to be on the side of the angels. Expediency alone has never been an adequate American reason for doing anything. When actions are judged, they go before the bar of God, where Mom and the Flag closely flank His presence.

  Jonathan Raban

  Mom, Angel, Flags

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• One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.

  Jonathan Raban

  Family, Acceptance, Brave

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• When I want an opinion, I'll get it from my peers - from men of vision, like our great railroad builders... Stanford, Huntington, Dinsmore... fellows with imaginations broad enough to span the continent.

  Jonathan Raban

  Men, Imagination, Vision

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