All Jonathan Raban Quotes
- 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
- Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose. Bar
- No president has come near to rivaling Lincoln as a writer. Come Near
- The north-south line of 'the mountains,' meaning the Cascade Range, forty miles east of Seattle, is a rigid political frontier. Cascade
- 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… Better
- 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… Anything Worthwhile
- 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… Bellingham
- 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… Audience
- 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… Benign
- 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… Better
- 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… All
- 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… America
- 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… Afloat
- 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… Book
- 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… Autobiography
- 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.… Actually Grasp