Quotes by Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Raban

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. The trees out-number the houses. And that’s completely typical of Seattle. You can’t quite tell: is it a city, is it a suburb, is the forest growing back?

Cities

Light

Night

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 worthwhile to say of art? I don’t.

Art

Soul

Thinking

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

Audacity

Junk

Principles

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.

Cities

Dark

Majority

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 and locomotion, usually seems too dangerous and demanding to live through with any confidence.

Cities

Community

Nostalgic

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.

House

Long

White

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

Bars

Presidential

Prose

One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set it. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.

Drama

Eden

Fall

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 have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.

Acceptance

Brave

Family

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 studiously polite.

Blue

Cities

Manners

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Acceptance

Angel

Art

Audacity

Bars

Blue

Book

Brave

Chaos

Character

Cities

Community

Dark

Destination

Details

Discipline

Distance

Drama

Dream

Easier

Eden

Essentials

Fall

Family

Father

Home

House

Junk

Law

Light

Loneliness

Long

Majority

Make Things Happen

Manners

Memories

Mom

Night

Nostalgic

Notebook

People

Presidential

Principles

Prose

Sake

Sea

Should Have

Sides

Society

Soul

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Quotes by Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Raban

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. The trees out-number the houses. And that’s completely typical of Seattle. You can’t quite tell: is it a city, is it a suburb, is the forest growing back?

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 worthwhile to say of art? I don’t.

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 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.

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 and locomotion, usually seems too dangerous and demanding to live through with any confidence.

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.

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

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 studiously polite.

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Topics by Jonathan Raban

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