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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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Jonathan Raban
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: June 14
Novelist
Travel Writer
Writer
Children
Treated
Different
Size
Years
Disease
College
Child
Sizes
Year
Benign
Comes
Heartbreak
Form
Departure

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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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Trouble defies the law of gravity. It's easier to pick up than to drop.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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If we live inside a bad joke, it is up to us to learn, at best and worst, to tell it well.
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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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