Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonathan Raban
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: June 14
Novelist
Travel Writer
Writer
Free
Ships
Swaying
Come
Chains
Afloat
Whole
Seemed
Seattle
Like
Sea
Mud
City
Tide
Built
Lifting
Cities
Tides
High
Ship
Berth

More quotes by Jonathan Raban

Image
No president has come near to rivaling Lincoln as a writer.
Jonathan Raban
Image
In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air.
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 this curious liberal island.
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
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
Trouble defies the law of gravity. It's easier to pick up than to drop.
Jonathan Raban
Image
In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Jonathan Raban
Image
Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.
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
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
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
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.
Jonathan Raban