Jonathan Raban
Jonathan Raban
Jonathan Rabanis a British travel writer and novelist. He has received several awards, such as the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and a 1997 Washington State Governor's Writer's Award. Since 1990 he has lived with his daughter in Seattle...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth14 June 1942
unique assessment self
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.
travel book journey
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.
political mountain east
The north-south line of 'the mountains,' meaning the Cascade Range, forty miles east of Seattle, is a rigid political frontier.
bad-jokes worst wells
If we live inside a bad joke, it is up to us to learn, at best and worst, to tell it well.
presidential bars prose
Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.
white house president
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.
audacity west junk
I loved the audacity of that American principle which says. When life gets tainted or goes stale, junk it! Leave it behind! Go West!
islands curious seattle
Seattle is this curious liberal island.
loneliness essentials make-things-happen
Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen.
rejection may denied
Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted.
funny-inspirational sleep looks
I ain't sleeping. I'm just taking a good look at the insides of my eyelids.
technology rivers track
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.
rules-and-regulations parks odd
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.
marine light sky
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.