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The north-south line of 'the mountains,' meaning the Cascade Range, forty miles east of Seattle, is a rigid political frontier.

Jonathan Raban

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Jonathan Raban
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: June 14
Novelist
Travel Writer
Writer
Miles
Frontier
East
Seattle
Mountain
Rigid
South
Frontiers
Meaning
Mountains
Line
Forty
Lines
North
Political
Range
Cascade

More quotes by Jonathan Raban

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Seattle was built out on pilings over the sea, and at high tide the whole city seemed to come afloat like a ship lifting free from a mud berth and swaying in its chains.
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Seattle is this curious liberal island.
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It's been so long since a talented writer last occupied the White House no wonder, then, that American writers have been among the most prominent of all the demographic groups claiming a piece of Barack Obama for themselves.
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I ain't sleeping. I'm just taking a good look at the insides of my eyelids.
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Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.
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No president has come near to rivaling Lincoln as a writer.
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'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.
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Because Washington state now votes by mail, elections here tend to play out, at an agonizingly slow speed, over many days and, sometimes, weeks.
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'Rage' is the word that most often attaches itself to the Tea Party movement, and it's true that, from the outside looking in, their public demonstrations appear to be more enraged than any political events in America since the race riots and anti-war protests of the 1960s.
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In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To the newcomer who has not learned its language, a large city is a chaos of details, a vast Woolworths store of differently colored, simlarly priced objects.
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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.
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Trouble defies the law of gravity. It's easier to pick up than to drop.
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When New Yorkers tell one about the dangers of their city, the muggings, the dinner parties to which no one turns up for fear of being attacked on the way, the traffic snarl-ups, the bland indifference of the city cops, they are unmistakably bragging.
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At night, what you see is a city, because all you see is lights. By day, it doesn't look like a city at all. The trees out-number the houses. And that's completely typical of Seattle. You can't quite tell: is it a city, is it a suburb, is the forest growing back?
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In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air.
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In the city one clings to nostalgic and unreal signs of community, takes forced refuge in codes, badges and coteries the city's life, of surfaces and locomotion, usually seems too dangerous and demanding to live through with any confidence.
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