Jonathan Raban quote: "Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things."

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar re...
JONATHAN RABAN

One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of t...
JONATHAN RABAN

Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserte...
JONATHAN RABAN

There's an enduring American compulsion to be on the side of the angels. Expediency alone has never ...
JONATHAN RABAN

The only nation I've ever been tempted to feel really racist about are the Swiss - a whole country o...
JONATHAN RABAN

From the moment that the first plow blade bit into the crust, the homesteaders began to destroy the ...
JONATHAN RABAN

The first comic book I ever read was an issue of 'Legion of Super-Heroes' where the earth wa...
JONATHAN HICKMAN

I know, especially in my family, people's feelings get hurt over the tiniest things. I'm sur...
JONATHAN KRISEL

The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countrie...
JONATHAN COE

If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it.
JONATHAN WINTERS

I love improvisation. You can't blame it on the writers. You can't blame it on direction. Yo...
JONATHAN WINTERS

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how many people remember you when you die.
JONATHAN ROSS

These people are real to me, and situations keep coming up where their emergence feels natural. It&#...
JONATHAN KELLERMAN

I collect primarily ceramics but also black-and-white photography and some bits of contemporary.
JONATHAN ANDERSON

I grew up, as I joke around, in the 'People's Republic of Charlestown' in the city of Bo...
JONATHAN TUCKER

I reassure all Nigerians and the international community of our firm commitment to free, fair and cr...
GOODLUCK JONATHAN

All Nigerians of voting age are free to vote based on their convictions. It is our duty to defend an...
GOODLUCK JONATHAN

One thing that I know and I feel Nigerians will celebrate is continuity and peace.
GOODLUCK JONATHAN

We want to refocus Nigeria to make sure that basic infrastructure is provided. The environment is cr...
GOODLUCK JONATHAN

I've always affirmed, nobody's ambition is worth the blood of any Nigerian.
GOODLUCK JONATHAN

When you talk about the oil wealth you compare nations. There are some nations with less than five m...
GOODLUCK JONATHAN

In my early days in school, I had no shoes, no school bags. There were days I had only one meal... I...
GOODLUCK JONATHAN

Well-trained medical doctors and engineers leave Nigeria to the developed countries. We want to reve...
GOODLUCK JONATHAN

We will bring justice to the savage terrorists known as Boko Haram. They will be defeated.
GOODLUCK JONATHAN

We want to lead a country where people will be less greedy. Where people will know that the commonwe...
GOODLUCK JONATHAN

The argument about zoning and the presidency of Nigeria is like the philosophical argument of the eg...
GOODLUCK JONATHAN

My brothers and sisters, we are all winners. In this context there is no victor and no vanquished. W...
GOODLUCK JONATHAN

When I started caregiving, I was not on very firm ground. My first marriage had dissolved. I was wor...
JONATHAN EVISON

One person's car is another person's scenery.
JONATHAN IVE

I toured Ontario in the winter of '48, in a touring company of The Drunkard, in which I played t...
JONATHAN FRID

Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be ...
JONATHAN SACKS

When we look at the flowers, we suddenly forget so many important things. We forget that all flowers...
JONATHAN MABERRY

My dad started taking me to Winnipeg games when I was 3 or 4. As a kid, I loved Wayne Gretzky, and I...
JONATHAN TOEWS

I think whenever anyone asked me why I wanted to be a hockey player, that's where it all started...
JONATHAN TOEWS

I'd love to have a proper sailing boat and go around the world.
JONATHAN POWELL

In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.
JONATHAN LETHEM

Which European leader today would not relish the wonder-working powers of a Moses? Budget deficit? U...
JONATHAN SACKS

The build-up of personal and collective debt in America and Europe should have sent warning signals ...
JONATHAN SACKS

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphi...
JONATHAN KOZOL

I never set out to intentionally hurt any player and never enticed any teammate to intentionally hur...
JONATHAN VILMA

The Futurists believed in the machine, in making a great big fuss, in being young. For a brief momen...
JONATHAN GALASSI

That test should not be about ratings. What should weigh is the knowledge that a public broadcaster ...
JONATHAN DIMBLEBY

Anyone who thinks that you become a journalist or broadcaster in order to be a wallflower needs to t...
JONATHAN DIMBLEBY

Promises and Pye-Crusts, are made to be broken.
JONATHAN SWIFT

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast gre...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places.
JONATHAN SWIFT

During an open water swim, it's easy to lose your direction. With all the splash, it can be quit...
JONATHAN BROWNLEE

I have a cameo in every movie. In '50/50,' I'm in the back of the bus.
JONATHAN LEVINE

Buttons, for me, are very sculptural things, and they are so fascinating.
JONATHAN ANDERSON

I wrote '33 Men' in eight weeks. Not only was it a combination of simultaneously writing and...
JONATHAN FRANKLIN

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams... but thereby makes us go blind to objective real...
JONATHAN HAIDT

If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it.
JONATHAN WINTERS

The pen is mightier than the sword, but no match for the accountant.
JONATHAN GLANCEY

We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love one another.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Necessity is the mother of invention, it is true, but its father is creativity, and knowledge is the...
JONATHAN SCHATTKE

There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Vision: the art of seeing things invisible.
JONATHAN SWIFT

We are limited, not by our abilities, but by our vision.
JONATHAN SWIFT

The Viennese wash everything. Where else in the world does the government hire public servants to wa...
JONATHAN CARROLL

In thinking about religion and society in the 21st century, we should broaden the conversation about...
JONATHAN SACKS

When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther...
JONATHAN KOZOL

If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a sco...
JONATHAN SWIFT

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be pu...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right, nor do Two Rights Make a Left.

Which ever side you think i...
JONATHAN BAILEY

If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scou...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for ...
JONATHAN FRANZEN

Happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.
JONATHAN SWIFT

The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false op...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Every one desires to live long, but no one would be old.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Your notions of friendship are new to me; I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he canno...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Two friendships in two breasts requires The same aversions and desires.
JONATHAN SWIFT

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the ...
JONATHAN SWIFT

In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my ju...
JONATHAN SWIFT

The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance and never to keep his w...
JONATHAN SWIFT

A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart.
JONATHAN SWIFT

I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It's blas...
JONATHAN KOZOL

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy ch...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches to conceive how others can be in want.
JONATHAN SWIFT

If the scandal of Jesus was that He was always touching the wrong people and inviting the wrong peop...
JONATHAN MARTIN

The true art of government consists in not governing too much.
JONATHAN SHIPLEY

The lack of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.
JONATHAN SWIFT

The most positive men are the most credulous.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Real love is always chaotic. You lose control; you lose perspective. You lose the ability to protect...
JONATHAN CARROLL

Belief is best when uncomplicated by reason.
JONATHAN TOM

More mony is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation ben...
JONATHAN KOZOL

May you live every day of your life.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. ...
JONATHAN FRANZEN

Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the...
JONATHAN TROPPER

Can you define "plan" as "a loose sequence of manifestly inadequate observations and conjectures, he...
JONATHAN STROUD

A footman may swear; but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often: but can he swear with e...
JONATHAN SWIFT

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there a...
JONATHAN CARROLL

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Your language indicates──and limits──what you think.
JONATHAN PRICE

Freedom is an illusion. It always comes at a price. Thinking
JONATHAN STROUD

The stories that bind us, Halli. The stories we live by, that dictate what we do and where we go. Th...
JONATHAN STROUD

Looks?” the skull said. “Who cares about that? It’s superficial. Outward appearance doesn’t ...
JONATHAN STROUD

Oh, we'll suffer in silence. You've given us plenty of practice at that.
JONATHAN STROUD

Because you're unique . You shine like a beacon, attracting the attention of all dark things." It ch...
JONATHAN STROUD

Nothing could keep me from you. Nothing in life or Death...
JONATHAN STROUD

I'ts how I want to remember him, the way he was that night: with horrors up ahead and horrors at our...
JONATHAN STROUD

Well, I make that one murder victim, one police interrogation and one conversation with a ghost,” ...
JONATHAN STROUD

Death is fugitive; even when you're watching for it, the actual instant somehow slips between your f...
JONATHAN STROUD

Well, when you're being held at gunpoint by a geriatric madman in a metal skirt, you've kind of hit ...
JONATHAN STROUD

God rest her soul and may she never walk at night
JONATHAN STROUD

A dozen more questions occurred to me. Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, six...
JONATHAN STROUD

One magician demanded I show him an image of the love of his life. I rustled up a mirror.
JONATHAN STROUD

According to some, heroic deaths are admirable things. I've never been convinced by this argument, m...
JONATHAN STROUD

Zealots: Wild eyed persons afflicted with incurable certainty about the workings of the world, a cer...
JONATHAN STROUD

Then again, Solomon was human. And that meant he was flawed (Go on, take a look at yourself in the m...
JONATHAN STROUD

Besides, if you're going to die horribly, you might as well do it with style.
JONATHAN STROUD

More ghosts have been created in bedrooms than anywhere else.
JONATHAN STROUD

Strange how close the darkness is, even when things seem brightest. Even in the glare of a summer no...
JONATHAN STROUD

Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Don't set your wit against a child.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with ...
JONATHAN SWIFT

It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdo...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Necessity is the mother of invention, it is true -- but it's father is creativity, and knowledge is ...
JONATHAN SCHATTKE

Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
JONATHAN SWIFT

If there are amazing graces on this earth, I believe that they are these good children sent to us by...
JONATHAN KOZOL

The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet w...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Complaint is the largest tribute Heaven receives.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Rebukes are easy from our betters,
From men of quality and letters;
But when low dunces will ...
JONATHAN SWIFT

What some people invent the rest enlarge.
JONATHAN SWIFT

All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you pleas...
JONATHAN SWIFT

In church your grandsire cut his throat; to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my he...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.
JONATHAN SWIFT

We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as in books it is generally the wor...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
JONATHAN SWIFT

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a n...
JONATHAN MILLER

Coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.
JONATHAN SWIFT

One of the very best rules of conversation is to never, say anything which any of the company wish h...
JONATHAN SWIFT

And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
JONATHAN KOZOL

Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same positio...
JONATHAN SWIFT

The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
JONATHAN SWIFT

I wasn't driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.
JONATHAN MILLER

For the rest,
Whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through e...
JONATHAN SWIFT

We have a choice: to plow new ground or let the weeds grow.
JONATHAN WESTOVER

I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations,
JONATHAN KOZOL

What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.
JONATHAN SWIFT

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.
JONATHAN SWIFT

One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
JONATHAN SWIFT

When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in ...
JONATHAN SWIFT

'Tis an old maxim in the schools,
That flattery's the food of fools;
Yet now and then your men...
JONATHAN SWIFT

She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitch folk.
JONATHAN SWIFT

I will venture to affirm, that the three seasons wherein our corn has miscarried did no more contrib...
JONATHAN SWIFT

It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: a...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Come, agree, the law's costly.
JONATHAN SWIFT

There's none so blind as they that won't see.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; wh...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Brutes find out where their talents lie;
A bear will not attempt to fly,
A foundered horse w...
JONATHAN SWIFT

But when a Man
JONATHAN SWIFT

Pretense is the overrating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
JONATHAN SWIFT

There are two sorts of hypocrites; ones that are deceived with their outward morality and external r...
JONATHAN EDWARDS

Attitudes to museums have changed. If it had Marilyn Monroe's knickers or Laurence Olivier's jockstr...
JONATHAN MILLER

Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected.
JONATHAN EDWARDS

I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words ...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth,...
JONATHAN SWIFT

I wont quarrel with my bread and butter.
JONATHAN SWIFT

I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
JONATHAN SWIFT

It was a bold person that first ate an oyster.
JONATHAN SWIFT

A bad forgery's the ultimate insult.
JONATHAN GASH

Promises and pie crusts are made to be broken.
JONATHAN SWIFT

But you think that it is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into...
JONATHAN SWIFT

She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same positi...
JONATHAN SWIFT

And he gave it for his opinion, "that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, ...
JONATHAN SWIFT

I warrant you lay abed till the cows came home.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Faith, that's as well said as if I had said it myself.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Forget regret, or life is yours to miss.
JONATHAN LARSON

Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.
JONATHAN SWIFT

What she doesn't say is just as important as what she does say -- but there's so much more of it. I ...
JONATHAN KATZ

Nor do they trust their tongue alone, but speak a language of their own; can read a nod, a shrug, a ...
JONATHAN SWIFT

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
JONATHAN SWIFT

As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a...
JONATHAN SWIFT

How we apples swim.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnis...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Convey a libel in a frown. And wink a reputation down!
JONATHAN SWIFT

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
JONATHAN SWIFT

The worthiest people are the most injured by slander, as is the best fruit which the birds have been...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
JONATHAN SWIFT

They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
JONATHAN SWIFT

What some invent the rest enlarge.
JONATHAN SWIFT

I heard the little bird say so.
JONATHAN SWIFT

A prince, the moment he is crown'd, Inherits every virtue sound, As emblems of the sovereign p...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.
JONATHAN SWIFT

So, naturalists observe, a flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller sti...
JONATHAN SWIFT

A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
JONATHAN SWIFT

In all distresses of our friends We first consult our private ends; While Nature, kindly bent ...
JONATHAN SWIFT

A man suffers death himself as often as he loses those dear to him.
JONATHAN SWIFT

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be p...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts wit...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Necessity is the mother of invention, it is true -- but it's father is creativity, and knowledge is...
JONATHAN SCHATTKE

Necessity is the mother of invention.
JONATHAN SWIFT

It is a maxim, that those to whom everybody allows the second place have an undoubted title to the ...
JONATHAN SWIFT

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that th...
JONATHAN SWIFT

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
JONATHAN SWIFT

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

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Jonathan Raban

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

Jonathan Raban

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