Jonathan Raban Quotes

45 quotes in 969 categories

• I ain't sleeping. I'm just taking a good look at the insides of my eyelids.
• Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted.
• In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air.
• 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…
• Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen.
• 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,…
• Seattle is this curious liberal island.
• 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…
• I loved the audacity of that American principle which says. When life gets tainted or goes stale, junk it! Leave it behind! Go West!
• 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…
• 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 city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of feeling guilt; a dream pursued, and found vain, wanting, and destructive.
• 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…
• In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

Browse Jonathan Raban Quotes by Category