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Jonathan Raban Quotes


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Quotes by 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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The trouble with ghostwriting is that it raises the issue of whether the president is in a state of diminished responsibility for what he says. Does he actually grasp the implications of the words he speaks?

~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?

~Jonathan Raban

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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.

~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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Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted.

~Jonathan Raban

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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.

~Jonathan Raban

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Seattle is this curious liberal 'island.'

~Jonathan Raban

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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.

~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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Biography

Nationality: British

Type: Author

Born: June 14th, 1942

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