Jonathan Raban Quotes

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday. Look around you - there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

And never forget, there is memory.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

Yesterday is just a memory.

When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.

The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.

I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared.

The most interesting thing which I heard of, in this township of Hull, was an unfailing spring, whose locality was pointed out tome on the side of a distant hill, as I was panting along the shore, though I did not visit it. Perhaps, if I should go through Rome, it would be some spring on the Capitoline Hill I should remember the longest.

The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, and dwell upon it.

A photograph it a souvenir of a memory. It is not a moment. It is the looking at the photograph that becomes the moment. Your own moment.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmán, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.

Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.

The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you’ve got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see? You’ve got to stop. You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

Let your memory be your travel bag.

I have a very vivid memory.

The part I remember best is the beginning.