Quote

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.

Jonathan Raban

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Jonathan Raban
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: June 14
Novelist
Travel Writer
Writer
Place
City
Rumours
Ends
Line
Seattle
Better
Coming
Detroit
Might
Cities
Succeeded
Even
Dangerous
Joined
Lines
Promised
Seoul
Taken
Failed
Rumour
Gone
Succeed
Lustre

More quotes by Jonathan Raban

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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.
Jonathan Raban
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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.
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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.
Jonathan Raban
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Heartbreak comes in different sizes, and the departure of an 18-year-old child for a far college has to be treated as a very benign form of the disease.
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.
Jonathan Raban
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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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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.
Jonathan Raban
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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.
Jonathan Raban
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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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Seattle is not an overly friendly city. It is a civil city, but not altogether friendly. People from outside mistake the civility for friendliness. Seattle is full of people who have their own lives to live. They won't waste their time being friendly. But they are civil.
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Sociology and anthropology are not disciplines which take easily to situations where people are able to live out their fantasies, not just in the symbolic action of ritual, but in the concrete theater of society at large.
Jonathan Raban
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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.
Jonathan Raban
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I ain't sleeping. I'm just taking a good look at the insides of my eyelids.
Jonathan Raban
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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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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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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.
Jonathan Raban
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In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air.
Jonathan Raban
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If we live inside a bad joke, it is up to us to learn, at best and worst, to tell it well.
Jonathan Raban
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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.
Jonathan Raban
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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.
Jonathan Raban