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Quote by Jonathan Raban

“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.”

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Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Raban, born on June 14, 1942, is a renowned travel writer from the United Kingdom. His works are known for their unique perspective and profound insights into travel experiences, covering a wide range of regions from Africa to the Americas. Raban's writing style often blends travel literature, history, and philosophy, giving his works a distinct literary value. more

“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.”

Littles Long Real Water Sea Rivers England Bottom Ran Pool Gathering Brooks Meadows Mills Muddy Norwich North Sea

Author:Jonathan Raban

“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.”

People Able Action Situation Fantasy Society Discipline Theater Ritual Concrete Sociology Symbolic Anthropology

Book:Soft City: Picador Classic

Source: Soft City: Picador Classic

“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.”

“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.”

Source: For Love and Money: A Writing Life

Quote by Jonathan Raban

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