Jonathan Raban Quotes - Page 2

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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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• 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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• 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

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.13, Pan Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

• 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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• Trouble defies the law of gravity. It's easier to pick up than to drop.

  Jonathan Raban

  Law, Trouble, Easier

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• Seattle is not an overly friendly city. It is a civil city, but not altogether friendly. People from outside mistake the civility for friendliness. Seattle is full of people who have their own lives to live. They won't waste their time being friendly. But they are civil.

  Jonathan Raban

  Mistake, Cities, People

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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

  Jonathan Raban (1992). “For Love and Money: A Writing Life”, Perennial

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• Seattle is this curious liberal island.

  Jonathan Raban

  Islands, Curious, Seattle

  "In Seattle with Jonathan Raban" by Mike Hodgkinson, www.theguardian.com. May 14, 2008.

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• 'Rage' is the word that most often attaches itself to the Tea Party movement, and it's true that, from the outside looking in, their public demonstrations appear to be more enraged than any political events in America since the race riots and anti-war protests of the 1960s.

  Jonathan Raban

  War, Party, Race Riots

  "Sipping with the Tea Party" by Jonathan Raban, www.theguardian.com. October 15, 2010.

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• It's been so long since a talented writer last occupied the White House; no wonder, then, that American writers have been among the most prominent of all the demographic groups claiming a piece of Barack Obama for themselves.

  Jonathan Raban

  White, Long, House

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.462, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• Heartbreak comes in different sizes, and the departure of an 18-year-old child for a far college has to be treated as a very benign form of the disease.

  Jonathan Raban

  Children, College, Years

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

  Jonathan Raban

  Prayer, Lessons

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.469, Pan Macmillan

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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

  Jonathan Raban (1981). “Old Glory, an American Voyage”, Simon & Schuster

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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

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.51, Pan Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• 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, Sides

  Jonathan Raban (1992). “For Love and Money: A Writing Life”, Perennial

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.17, Pan Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

• The Falklands held a mirror up to our own islands, and it reflected, in brilliantly sharp focus, all our injured belittlement, our sense of being beleaguered, neglected and misunderstood.

  Jonathan Raban

  Islands, Mirrors, Focus

  1986 Coasting, ch.3.

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• I ain't sleeping. I'm just taking a good look at the insides of my eyelids.

  Jonathan Raban

  Funny Inspirational, Sleep, Looks

  Jonathan Raban (1981). “Old Glory, an American Voyage”, Simon & Schuster

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

  Jonathan Raban

  President

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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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• 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

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.12, Pan Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• 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, East

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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, Detroit

  Jonathan Raban (2011). “Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America”, p.303, Vintage

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• Sociology and anthropology are not disciplines which take easily to situations where people are able to live out their fantasies, not just in the symbolic action of ritual, but in the concrete theater of society at large.

  Jonathan Raban

  Discipline, People, Society

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.53, Pan Macmillan

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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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