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Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Raban Quotes

Travel writer

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Famous Jonathan Raban Quotes

“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.”

LightMightUsedFeltCitiesImagineSkyMountainLowsOneselfWeatherEveningBritainMarineRight DirectionSeattleDampLingeringHomelyLatitude
Book:Driving Home: An American Scrapbook
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“When traveling, I usually keep a notebook: when home at my desk, the notebook serves mainly to remind me how little I saw at the time, or rather how I was noticing the wrong things. But the notes do spur memories, and it's the memories I trust. The wine stain on the page may tell me more than the words there, which usually strike me as hopelessly inadequate.”

MayLittlesHomeMemoriesSawsPagesWineNotesStrikesDesksNotebookInadequateWrong ThingsNoticingStainsSpurs
Author:Jonathan Raban
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“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.”

ThinkingKindHappensLastsNightStyleAuthorityAwakeProphetPoundsSpokesSolitaryPostmodernismAuthorshipJoycePostmodernEliotWastelandWoolfAwake At NightYeats
Author:Jonathan Raban
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“We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.”

NeedsSelfCitiesSpecialSeriousUniquePrivacyTrafficCitizenshipImaginativeUtopiaEcologicalAssessmentProgrammesIngeniousSpecial RelationshipPlasticityPrivacy And Freedom
Book:Soft City: Picador Classic
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“The [travel] writer, looking back at the journey from a distance of a year or two (or three), is a different character from the hapless character who undertook the trip: wise after the event, with the leisure to tease out meanings from the experience that the distracted traveler never had, and often impatient with his alter ego's blinkered and unsatisfactory version of things.”

YearsTwoDifferentCharacterThreeWiseJourneyEventsEgoDistanceVersionsLeisureLooking BackTravelerDistractedImpatientTeaseDifferent CharactersAlter Ego
Author:Jonathan Raban
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“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.”

FallLiteratureTreeReadyDramaCorruptionLandscapeClassicInstantApplesEdenSerpentGleamAmerican LiteratureAmerican Landscape
Book:For Love and Money: A Writing Life
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“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 into a little trouty pool, then ran on through water meadows over graveled shallows into Fakenham [England], where it slowed and deepened, gathering strength for the long drifts across muddy flatlands to Norwich and the North Sea.”

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Author:Jonathan Raban
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“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 exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”

MenNeedsArtRealHardPlayCitiesCreativeImagineStyleMaterialsIllusionMythArchitectureAspirationNightmareMapsStatisticsPeculiarUrbanVocabularySociologyLiving In The CityDemography
Author:Jonathan Raban
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“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.”

Has BeensSeemsCultureBeliefGivenAcceptingFamilyImpossibleAcceptanceTaughtReadyNormalIdealsBraveWesternMythFeaturesHeroicStableAdmirableNormal LifeFiberHappy Marriage
Book:For Love and Money: A Writing Life
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“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.”

BookNovelJourneyFitTravelEmbraceAncientMetaphorDeceptiveSimulationContingencyFragmentationTravel Books
Book:For love & money: writing, reading, travelling, 1969-1987
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“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.”

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Book:Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America
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