Jonathan Raban Quotes - Page 2

The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of feeling guilt; a dream pursued, and found vain, wanting, and destructive.

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.

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.

'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.

Seattle is this curious liberal island.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I loved the audacity of that American principle which says. When life gets tainted or goes stale, junk it! Leave it behind! Go West!

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 being attacked on the way, the traffic snarl-ups, the bland indifference of the city cops, they are unmistakably bragging.

Inaugurals conventionally start with a history lesson and finish with a prayer.

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. When actions are judged, they go before the bar of God, where Mom and the Flag closely flank His presence.

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.

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 action of ritual, but in the concrete theater of society at large.

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.

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.

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.

Because Washington state now votes by mail, elections here tend to play out, at an agonizingly slow speed, over many days and, sometimes, weeks.

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

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

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.

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.