All Jonathan Raban Quotes
- I ain't sleeping. I'm just taking a good look at the insides of my eyelids. Eyelids
- Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted. Always Suggest
- In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air. 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… Admitted
- Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen. Acute
- 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,… Any
- Seattle is this curious liberal island. Curious
- 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… American
- I loved the audacity of that American principle which says. When life gets tainted or goes stale, junk it! Leave it behind! Go West! American
- 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… Any
- 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… Anonymous
- The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of feeling guilt; a dream pursued, and found vain, wanting, and destructive. Been
- 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… Chaos
- In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes. Assimilation
- 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… Attacked
- 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… All
- 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… Across
- 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… Able
- 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… Architecture
- 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… Accept
- 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.… Action
- 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… All
- Because Washington state now votes by mail, elections here tend to play out, at an agonizingly slow speed, over many days and, sometimes, weeks. Agonizingly
- Inaugurals conventionally start with a history lesson and finish with a prayer. Conventionally
- Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony. Distance