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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
Comes
Heartbreak
Form
Departure
Children
Treated
Different
Size
Years
Disease
College
Child
Sizes
Year
Benign

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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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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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'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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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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I ain't sleeping. I'm just taking a good look at the insides of my eyelids.
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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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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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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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No president has come near to rivaling Lincoln as a writer.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Seattle is this curious liberal island.
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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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