If we live inside a bad joke, it is up to us to learn, at best and worst, to tell it well. — Jonathan Raban Copy Share Image
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… — Jonathan Raban Copy Share
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… — Jonathan Raban Copy Share
Inaugurals conventionally start with a history lesson and finish with a prayer. — Jonathan Raban Copy Share
When New Yorkers tell one about the dangers of their city, the muggings, the dinner parties to which no one turns up for fear… — Jonathan Raban Copy Share
My new city [Seattle] and its hinterland felt deceptively homely. Their similar latitude gave them the angular light and lingering evenings I was used… — Jonathan Raban Copy Share
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.… — Jonathan Raban Copy Share
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 Copy Share
The only nation I've ever been tempted to feel really racist about are the Swiss - a whole country of phobic hand washers living… — Jonathan Raban Copy Share
The [travel] writer, looking back at the journey from a distance of a year or two (or three), is a different character from the… — Jonathan Raban Copy Share
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… — Jonathan Raban Copy Share
Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted. — Jonathan Raban Copy Share
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… — Jonathan Raban Copy Share
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… — Jonathan Raban Copy Share
One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage.… — Jonathan Raban Copy Share
