Jonathan Raban Quotes

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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

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

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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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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

Jonathan Raban (1987). “For love & money: writing, reading, travelling, 1969-1987”

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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

Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.181, Pan Macmillan

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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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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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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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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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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

4 Copy quote
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, Tides

Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.16, Pan Macmillan

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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

Feet, America, Rude

1990 HuntingMister Heartbreak, ch.2.

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If we live inside a bad joke, it is up to us to learn, at best and worst, to tell it well.

Jonathan Raban

Bad Jokes, Worst, Wells

1986 Coasting, ch.6.

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

Jonathan Raban

Presidential, Bars, Prose

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

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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

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

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I've taught the better class of tourist both to see and not to see; to lift their eyes above and beyond the inessentials, and thrill to our western Nature in her majesty.

Jonathan Raban

Eye, Class, Tourists

"Looking Together: Writers on Art". Book by Rebecca Brown and Mary Jane Knecht, April 30, 2009.

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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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The [travel] writer, looking back at the journey from a distance of a year or two (or three), is a different character from the hapless character who undertook the trip: wise after the event, with the leisure to tease out meanings from the experience that the distracted traveler never had, and often impatient with his alter ego's blinkered and unsatisfactory version of things.

Jonathan Raban

Wise, Distance, Character

18 Copy quote
Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen.

Jonathan Raban

Loneliness, Essentials, Make Things Happen

Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.152, Pan Macmillan

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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

Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.378, Pan Macmillan

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Good travel books are novels at heart.

Jonathan Raban

Book, Heart, Novel

Recalled by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the NewYorkTimes, 26 Jan1987, reviewing Raban's novel Coasting (1986).

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One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set it. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.

Jonathan Raban

Drama, Fall, Eden

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

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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

Rules And Regulations, Parks, Wilderness

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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 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

Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.40, Pan Macmillan

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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

"'He tried his best to veil it, but Obama is an intellectual'" by Jonathan Raban, www.theguardian.com. November 7, 2008.

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Born: June 14, 1942
Occupation: Travel writer
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