Top 40 Jonathan Raban Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “In an underdeveloped country don’t drink the water. In a developed country don’t breathe the air.”

— Jonathan Raban

2. “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.”

— Jonathan Raban

3. “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.”

— Jonathan Raban

4. “It always seems to me odd to call a place a wilderness when every wilderness area in the US bristles with rules and regulations as to how you can behave, what you’re allowed to do, and is patrolled by armed rangers enforcing the small print. They’re parks, of course, not wildernesses at all.”

— Jonathan Raban

5. “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.”

— Jonathan Raban

6. “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 starts, rehearses life’s own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.”

— Jonathan Raban

7. “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?”

— Jonathan Raban

8. “Seattle is this curious liberal island.”

— Jonathan Raban

9. “Trouble defies the law of gravity. It’s easier to pick up than to drop.”

— Jonathan Raban

10. “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.”

— Jonathan Raban

11. “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 a wonder of nature to this sluggish canal on the wrong side of the tracks.”

— Jonathan Raban

12. “We have so separated ourselves, person from person and group from group, in the city, that we have made hatred a dreadfully easy emotion. It comes to us as lightly and insidiously as the symptoms of an unconsciously harboured disease.”

— Jonathan Raban

13. “Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.”

— Jonathan Raban

14. “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 the Best?,’ published in 1975.”

— Jonathan Raban

15. “Inaugurals conventionally start with a history lesson and finish with a prayer.”

— Jonathan Raban

16. “People who live on continents get into the habit of regarding the ocean as journey’s end, the full stop at the end of the trek. For people who live on islands, the sea is always the beginning. It’s the ferry to the mainland, the escape route from the boredom and narrowness of home.”

— Jonathan Raban

17. “The north-south line of ‘the mountains,’ meaning the Cascade Range, forty miles east of Seattle, is a rigid political frontier.”

— Jonathan Raban

18. “I ain’t sleeping. I’m just taking a good look at the insides of my eyelids.”

— Jonathan Raban

19. “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, with motion itself as the only object.”

— Jonathan Raban

20. “Good travel books are novels at heart.”

— Jonathan Raban

21. “Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted.”

— Jonathan Raban

22. “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 from a mud berth and swaying in its chains.”

— Jonathan Raban

23. “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.”

— Jonathan Raban

24. “If we live inside a bad joke, it is up to us to learn, at best and worst, to tell it well.”

— Jonathan Raban

25. “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.”

— Jonathan Raban

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

— Jonathan Raban

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

— Jonathan Raban

28. “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.”

— Jonathan Raban

29. “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.”

— Jonathan Raban

30. “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.”

— Jonathan Raban

31. “Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen.”

— Jonathan Raban

32. “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 library, and moreover to rebuild every other library in the city: 28 of them.”

— Jonathan Raban

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

— Jonathan Raban

34. “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 the Canadian border, through Everett, Seattle, and Tacoma, to Olympia, the state capital, at the southern end of the sound.”

— Jonathan Raban

35. “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.”

— Jonathan Raban

36. “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. Does he actually grasp the implications of the words he speaks?”

— Jonathan Raban

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

— Jonathan Raban

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

— Jonathan Raban

39. “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 to our western Nature in her majesty.”

— Jonathan Raban

40. “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.”

— Jonathan Raban

41. “Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves – Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there.”

— Jonathan Raban

42. “In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes.”

— Jonathan Raban