Jonathan Raban Quotes

A collection of quotes by Jonathan Raban.

Jonathan Raban is a British travel writer, novelist, and essayist. Born in Norfolk, England in 1942, Raban has written numerous acclaimed works exploring themes of geography, identity, and society. His travel writing often blends personal experiences with historical and cultural analysis, capturing the essence of the places he visits. Renowned for his distinct narrative style and keen observations, Raban has received numerous awards throughout his career, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. His notable works include "Bad Land: An American Romance," "Coasting," and "Passage to Juneau."

There's an enduring American compulsion to be on the side of

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.

Reason

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of ar

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.

Cities

One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture

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.

Family

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a jou

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.

Travel

Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being de

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

Rejection

The only book by a modern president that bears serious compa

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.

Dreams

'Dreams From My Father' reveals more about Obama than is usu

'Dreams From My Father' reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader.

Dreams

Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackana

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.

Failure