Map Quotes

“I want to learn how to speak to anyone at any time and make us both feel a little bit better, lighter, richer, with no commitments of ever meeting again. I want to learn how to stand wherever with whoever and still feel stable. I want to learn how to unlock the locks to our minds, my mind, so that when I hear opinions or views that don’t match up with mine, I can still listen and understand. I want to burn up lifeless habits of following maps and to-do lists, concentrated liquids to burn my mind and throat
and I want to go back to the way nature shaped me. I want to learn to go on well with whatever I have in my hands at the moment
in a natural state of mind,
certain like the sea.

I will find comfort in the rhythm of the sea.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“We were just looking at maps...”
― Rick Riordan, The Battle of the Labyrinth

“The best parts of life are the things we can't plan. And it's a lot harder to find happiness if you're only searching in one place. Sometimes, you just have to throw away the map. Admit that you don't know where you're going and stop pressuring yourself to figure it out. Besides...a map is a life someone else already lived. It's more fun to make your own.”
― Cora Carmack, Finding It

“Is that all we have left? Is that all we are? Lights on a map that are slowly dying, hanging on for nothing?”
― Carrie Ryan, The Dead-Tossed Waves

“The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it.”
― Cara Black, Murder in the Bastille

“To put a city in a book, to put the world on one sheet of paper -- maps are the most condensed humanized spaces of all...They make the landscape fit indoors, make us masters of sights we can't see and spaces we can't cover.”
― Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces

“I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.”
― Steven Wright

“A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”
― Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics

“What is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons?”
― Terry Pratchett

“When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.
The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. There is a lot that you can't change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey . . .”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Maps codify the miracle of existence.”
― Nicholas Crane, Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet

“There isn’t a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights.”
― Mark Twain

“A map was a fine thing to study when you were disposed to think of something else, being made up of names that would turn into a chime if you went back upon them.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Even today, more than eighty years after Oort's bold guess, we still don't have a clue what this dark matter is made of. We know it exists. We know where it is. We have maps of its presence within and around galaxies throughout the universe. We even have stringent constraints on what it is not, but we have no clue what it is. And yes, its presence is overwhelming: for every one kilogram of ordinary matter made out of neutrons and protons and electrons, there are five kilograms of dark matter, made out of who-knows-what.”
― Christophe Galfard, The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time, and Beyond

“Sanity is the thread through the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Once cut, or unravelled, all that lies in wait are gloomy tunnels unfathomable by any map, and what hides there is a beast in human form, wearing our own face.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“A novel is a tricky thing to map.”
― Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“We only pass this way once..unless our significant other is reading the map..”
― kjforce

“Every Friday The Thirteenth I celebrate Knights Templar Day. Here at my Duck Farm Gift Shop, I've got THE authentic map that details the location of their hidden treasure, and I'll sell it to you for ONLY $19.95. (Limit one per customer.)”
― Jarod Kintz, Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.

“We map these lands, but they are not ours.”
― Alex B. Hill, Detroit in 50 Maps

“Eine Weltkarte, in der das Land Utopia nicht verzeichnet ist, verdient keinen Blick, denn sie lässt die eine Küste aus, wo die Menschheit ewig landen wird.
Und wenn die Menschheit da angelangt ist, hält sie Umschau nach einem besseren Land und richtet ihre Segel dahin. Der Fortschritt ist die Verwirklichung von Utopien.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900”
― Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

“Then Mr. Pratt handed me a map.

The less said about this map, the better. You can put anything you like upon a map: roads, rivers, villages, towns, grasslands, water pools, mountain passes, and plenty more. Paper is patient, it won’t refuse anything; but though a river or a bridge appears on a map it doesn’t mean that you’re going to find it where it is supposed to be. (The Cattle Drive)”
― B. Traven, The Night Visitor and Other Stories

“What she hadn't realized was that although the cake had been intended to represent the book's theme, it nevertheless lacked specific references or related symbolism connected to the story itself. Rather than appearing desert-like ‒ as Camp Green Lake had been ‒ it was highlighted by a solid green rectangle of icing abutting a thin strip of greenish-brown streaks above it.

It was a yard ‒ their back yard ‒ behind which an unkempt field with dense patches of slouching grass and clusters of hearty weeds were interspersed among barren areas of dirt and sand that had persisted for decades. In contrast to and serving as an adjacent reminder of the verdant Lansing property having appeared likewise but half of one ago ‒ while currently being much larger than the uppermost border of any cake could be reasonably expected to portray.”
― Monte Souder

“But it was the center of the room that drew my eyes, for there was a great circular table, covered in a glass dome, on which sat a model of Arcadia.
I approached it slowly; it was so delicately detailed, I felt it would crumble if I breathed, despite the glass. There was the ocean, crafted of tinted glass so that it glimmered like real water. There were the southern mountains, pocked with entrances to the coal mines; there was the river Severn, there the capital city of Sardis, still half-ruined by the great fire of twenty years ago.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Cruel Beauty

“Being lost does not suggest the absence of a map.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I recited segments of Rilke's verses
as psalm interludes for a woman
without a map, welcomed by blurry
mornings with fogged windowpanes.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Let your thoughts be your guiding light.”
― Steven Magee

“There were parts of the city we hadn't seen in years. They reminded us of people who had left us, and we excised them from our maps before they could spread. It's not the same, we said, it's just not the same. It's not like it was, before. We never said before what, but it was understood.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Why We Came to the City

“Pryia seguiu o mapa invisível trilhado por sua sombra pelas tendas coloridas.”
― Natalia Avila, A Falsificadora de Mapas

“If a drift is a rift, it's a shift.”
― Martin Uzochukwu Ugwu

“There is a power in maps that can never be taken lightly.”
― Alex B. Hill, Detroit in 50 Maps