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Quote by Jonathan Raban

“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.”

Quote by Jonathan Raban

Book:Old Glory, an American Voyage
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Work

Old Glory, an American Voyage

This book delves into the rich history of the American flag, tracing its evolution and significance across different eras and milestones in the nation's past. more

Author

Jonathan Raban
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

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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Book:For love & money: writing, reading, travelling, 1969-1987
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