Jonathan Raban > Quotes

“‎Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.”
― Jonathan Raban

“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.”
― Jonathan Raban, Soft City

“I loved the sense of being so close to the city, yet so far out on this magnificently eventful sea, with its wild creatures and mazy channels. I thought, if I lived in Seattle, I’d keep a boat of my own, and sail it to where the tide ran at sixteen knots at springs, and where there were whirlpools ten feet deep. I’d live on a sane frontier between nature and civilization, with one foot in the water, the other in a metropolis of restaurants and bookstores. I’d read and write in the mornings, and run away to sea in the afternoons.”
― Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings

“We have so separated ourselves, person from person and group from group, in the city, that we have made hatred a dreadfully easy emotion. It comes to us as lightly and insidiously as the symptoms of an unconsciously harboured disease.”
― Jonathan Raban, Soft City

“People who live on continents get into the habit of regarding the ocean as journey's end, the full stop at the end of the trek. For people who live on islands, the sea is always the beginning. It's the ferry to the mainland, the escape route from the boredom and narrowness of home.”
― Jonathan Raban, Coasting: A Private Voyage

“Bellevue and its satellites were not suburbs so much as—in the rising term—an Edge City, with its own economy, sociology, and architecture. Things made on the Eastside were odorless, labor-intensive, and credit-card thin, like computer software and aerospace-related electronics gear. They were assembled in low, tree-shaded factories, whose large grounds were known as “campuses”—for in Bellevue all work was graduate work, and the jargon of school and university leaked naturally into the workplace. Seen from an elevated-freeway distance, Bellevue looked like one of its own products: a giant circuit board of color-coded diodes and resistors, connected by a mazy grid of filaments.”
― Jonathan Raban, Driving Home: An American Journey

“I am afraid of the sea. I fear the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal whirlpool; the loom of a big ocean swell, sinister and dark, in windless calm; the rip, the eddy, the race; the sheer abyssal depth of the water, as one floats like a trustful beetle on the surface tension. Rationalism deserts me at sea. I’ve seen the scowl of enmity and contempt on the face of a wave that broke from the pack and swerved to strike at my boat. I have twice promised God that I would never again put out to sea, if only He would, just this once, let me reach harbour. I’m not a natural sailor, but a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I’m at sea. Yet for the last fifteen”
― Jonathan Raban, Passage To Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings

“From the moment that the first plow blade bit into the crust, the homesteaders began to destroy the foundations of their new life, and in a very few years the crust was gone--used up, scattered, blown away by the dry summer winds.”
― Jonathan Raban, Bad Land: An American Romance

“For Diane, places like Brooklyn and the Bronx were as remote as Beirut and Teheran. Nobody went there. The subway system was an ugly rumour - she had not set foot in it for years. She did quite often go walking alone in the knot of streets around East 30th, as a seriously entrenched Air Person would not have dared to do; and sometimes what she saw on television led her to take the elevator down to the street, where she would prowl through her own neighbourhood to the site of a disaster or the scene of a crime, like a war correspondent braving the battlefield for the sake of a story.

I sometimes joined her on evenings when she was dining out uptown - evenings that had the flavour of a tense commando operation. At eight o'clock, the lobby of her building was full of Air People waiting for their transport. A guard would secure a cab, and we'd fly through New York to the West 60s or East 80s. I thought the cabs far grimmer and more alarming than the subways. Their suspension had usually been long wrecked by the potholes on the Avenues; the bulletproof Plexiglass screen between us and the driver had knife-scratches on it and had turned milky and opaque with age; the blood-coloured seat covers were ripped and holed. The driver was nearly always in a state of uncontained fury, and inclined to treat his cab as a weapon, an Exocet missile in the War of New York. Swaying and shuddering over the terrible roads, whole the driver burbled obscenities at everyone who came within his sight, was an experience calculated to make Air People fervently wish themselves back in their safe eyries.”
― Jonathan Raban, Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America

“slope of a valley. There is something satisfyingly eerie about a landfall – any landfall. The growing coast ahead, no matter how exhaustively charted it is, or how old and familiar its history and internal topography, looks so imaginary from this sea distance. Watching it come slowly alive, inseparable from its broken reflection in the water, you feel that you’re making it up as you go along. It’s not real. On a green hill above the town you see a fine, brand-new medieval castle – turrets, towers, keeps, drawbridges, the lot. Like a novelist toying with an invented landscape on the page, you think, that won’t wash; and, obedient to the thought, the handsome castle rubs itself out and in its place there comes up a stolid clump of gasholders or the cooling towers of a power station.”
― Jonathan Raban, Coasting

“I had never seen charts on which land and sea were so intricately tangled, in a looping scribble of blue and beige.”
― Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings

“For 100 years, governments of every colour were committed to enlarging the language of citizenship. Now Mrs. Thatcher's government is committed to closing it.”
― Jonathan Raban, God, Man & Mrs Thatcher