Quotes from Jonathan Raban

We have so separated ourselves, person from person and group from group, in the city, that we have made hatred a dreadfully easy emotion. It comes to us as lightly and insidiously as the symptoms of an unconsciously harboured disease.

People who live on continents get into the habit of regarding the ocean as journey's end, the full stop at the end of the trek. For people who live on islands, the sea is always the beginning. It's the ferry to the mainland, the escape route from the boredom and narrowness of home.

For 100 years, governments of every colour were committed to enlarging the language of citizenship. Now Mrs. Thatcher's government is committed to closing it.

From the moment that the first plow blade bit into the crust, the homesteaders began to destroy the foundations of their new life, and in a very few years the crust was gone--used up, scattered, blown away by the dry summer winds.

I had never seen charts on which land and sea were so intricately tangled, in a looping scribble of blue and beige.

Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn't involve any destinations. It was going to the going's sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with motion itself as the only object.

Democrats inhabit the low shores of Puget Sound, mostly on its eastern side, in a ragged trail of port-cities that stretches from Bellingham, close to the Canadian border, through Everett, Seattle, and Tacoma, to Olympia, the state capital, at the southern end of the sound.

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.

Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.

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?

Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.

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?

No president has come near to rivaling Lincoln as a writer.