Jonathan Raban Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

No president has come near to rivaling Lincoln as a writer. — Jonathan Raban

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

'Dreams From My Father' reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader. — Jonathan Raban

In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air. — Jonathan Raban

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

Inaugurals conventionally start with a history lesson and finish with a prayer. — Jonathan Raban

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

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

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

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

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

Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted. — Jonathan Raban

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

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

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

'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

From the moment that the first plow blade bit into the crust, the homesteaders began to destroy the foundations of their new life, and in a very few years the crust was gone
used up, scattered, blown away by the dry summer winds. — Jonathan Raban

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good travel books are novels at heart. — Jonathan Raban

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

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

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

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

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

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

People who live on continents get into the habit of regarding the ocean as journey's end, the full stop at the end of the trek. For people who live on islands, the sea is always the beginning. It's the ferry to the mainland, the escape route from the boredom and narrowness of home. — Jonathan Raban

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democrats inhabit the low shores of Puget Sound, mostly on its eastern side, in a ragged trail of port-cities that stretches from Bellingham, close to the Canadian border, through Everett, Seattle, and Tacoma, to Olympia, the state capital, at the southern end of the sound. — Jonathan Raban

Seattle is this curious liberal 'island.' — Jonathan Raban