Quote

'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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonathan Raban
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: June 14
Novelist
Travel Writer
Writer
Reader
Time
Known
Intends
Like
Father
Usually
Reveals
Shows
Dreams
Sentence
Political
Perhaps
Sentences
Dream
Dead
Leaders
Feels
Leader
Obama
Real
Audience
Private
Mind
Working

More quotes by Jonathan Raban

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Trouble defies the law of gravity. It's easier to pick up than to drop.
Jonathan Raban
Image
If we live inside a bad joke, it is up to us to learn, at best and worst, to tell it well.
Jonathan Raban
Image
I ain't sleeping. I'm just taking a good look at the insides of my eyelids.
Jonathan Raban
Image
'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.
Jonathan Raban
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
No president has come near to rivaling Lincoln as a writer.
Jonathan Raban
Image
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
Image
Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there.
Jonathan Raban
Image
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.
Jonathan Raban
Image
The north-south line of 'the mountains,' meaning the Cascade Range, forty miles east of Seattle, is a rigid political frontier.
Jonathan Raban
Image
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.
Jonathan Raban
Image
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.
Jonathan Raban
Image
Seattle is this curious liberal island.
Jonathan Raban
Image
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
Image
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?
Jonathan Raban