Jonathan Raban Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“Seattle is this curious liberal 'island.'”

“Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.”

“'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.”

“I've taught the better class of tourist both to see and not to see; to lift their eyes above and beyond the inessentials, and thrill to our western Nature in her majesty.”

“When I want an opinion, I'll get it from my peers - from men of vision, like our great railroad builders... Stanford, Huntington, Dinsmore... fellows with imaginations broad enough to span the continent.”

“No president has come near to rivaling Lincoln as a writer.”

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

“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.”

“Seattle is a liberal city, its politics not so much blue (in the American, not the British, sense) as deep ultramarine, and its manners are studiously polite.”

“Simply as a writer of books I'm thrilled and proud that Seattle should have raised, on a public vote, sufficient money to build a central library, and moreover to rebuild every other library in the city: 28 of them.”