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, Light, Cities

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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, Cities, Clothes

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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

  Sea, Cities, Mud

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• Seattle is this curious liberal island.

  Jonathan Raban

  Islands, Curious, Seattle

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• Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted.

  Jonathan Raban

  Rejection, May, Denied

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• The only real river I knew was hardly more than a brook. It spilled through a tumbledown mill at the bottom of our road, opened into a little trouty pool, then ran on through water meadows over graveled shallows into Fakenham [England], where it slowed and deepened, gathering strength for the long drifts across muddy flatlands to Norwich and the North Sea.

  Jonathan Raban

  Real, Sea, Rivers

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• In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air.

  Jonathan Raban

  Country, Nature, Air

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• Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.

  Jonathan Raban

  Book, People, Style

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• All this piling up of one technology on top of another-railroad on steamboat, interstate highway on railroad, hydroelectric dam on watermill-had reduced the Mississippi from a wonder of nature to this sluggish canal on the wrong side of the tracks.

  Jonathan Raban

  Technology, Rivers, Track

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• When New Yorkers tell one about the dangers of their city, the muggings, the dinner parties to which no one turns up for fear of being attacked on the way, the traffic snarl-ups, the bland indifference of the city cops, they are unmistakably bragging.

  Jonathan Raban

  New York, Party, Cities

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• Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen.

  Jonathan Raban

  Loneliness, Essentials, Make Things Happen

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• To the newcomer who has not learned its language, a large city is a chaos of details, a vast Woolworths store of differently colored, simlarly priced objects.

  Jonathan Raban

  Cities, Details, Chaos

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• Seattle is a liberal city, its politics not so much blue (in the American, not the British, sense) as deep ultramarine, and its manners are studiously polite.

  Jonathan Raban

  Blue, Cities, Manners

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• I loved the audacity of that American principle which says. When life gets tainted or goes stale, junk it! Leave it behind! Go West!

  Jonathan Raban

  Junk, Principles, Audacity

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• In the city one clings to nostalgic and unreal signs of community, takes forced refuge in codes, badges and coteries; the city's life, of surfaces and locomotion, usually seems too dangerous and demanding to live through with any confidence.

  Jonathan Raban

  Cities, Community, Nostalgic

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• In rural areas the majority of the victims of violent crime know their assailants (indeed, are probably married to them); in cities, the killer and the mugger come out of the anonymous dark, their faces unrecognized, their motives obscure.

  Jonathan Raban

  Dark, Cities, Majority

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• The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of feeling guilt; a dream pursued, and found vain, wanting, and destructive.

  Jonathan Raban

  Dream, Cities, Feelings

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• Simply as a writer of books I'm thrilled and proud that Seattle should have raised, on a public vote, sufficient money to build a central library, and moreover to rebuild every other library in the city: 28 of them.

  Jonathan Raban

  Book, Should Have, Cities

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• The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama's 'Dreams From My Father' is Jimmy Carter's short campaign autobiography, 'Why Not the Best?,' published in 1975.

  Jonathan Raban

  Dream, Father, Book

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