Maps Quotes

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“You can't map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know that There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs. ”
― Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic

“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.”
― Roseanne Barr

“He lunged for the maps. I grabbed the chair and hit him with it. He went down. I hit him again to make sure he stayed that way, stepped over him, and picked up the maps.
"I win.”
― Ilona Andrews, Magic Burns

“Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth, things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love Over Scotland

“A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. ... All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“They were maps that lived, maps that one could study, frown over, and add to; maps, in short, that really meant something.”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

“The most important places on a map are the places we haven't been yet”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“I speak to maps. And sometimes they something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps, the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea

“A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.”
― Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“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

“A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“That explains a lot,' he said. 'I suppose it's also why we've never glimpsed that giant compass in the corner of the Atlantic. I have to say, I'm a little disappointed.”
― Gideon Defoe, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists

“Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that the often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

“The map? I will first make it.”
― Patrick White, Voss

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

“Through our maps, we willingly become a part of their boundaries. If our home is included, we feel pride, perhaps familiarity, but always a sense that this is ours. If it is not, we accept our roles as outsiders, though we may be of the same mind and culture. In this way, maps can be dangerous and powerful tools.”
― Debbie Lee Wesselmann, Trutor & The Balloonist

“He comes down next to me, and when I hold out my hand, he takes it. Our fingers lace together. And in that feeling, that perfect feeling of our hands and fingers pressed together, I want to tell him everything. I want to tell him about Josh, and his sister, Emily. I want to tell him about tall, crazy Gert. I want to tell him about bridges and funerals, and most of all, maps. More than anything else, I want to tell him about myself. I want to tell him that I know what things look like from above now. There's so much I want to tell him, because I know he'll understand.”
― Shawn Klomparens, Jessica Z.

“For our one-month anniversary, he made me a picture map.

A map of us.

It’s years in the making, and it’s messy and convoluted, some of it even tragic. But I wouldn’t change the route, because we walked it together, even when we were apart. And the best part about it is that it’s unfinished.

Uncertainty isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes it can even be filled with extraordinary potential.”
― Jenn Bennett, Starry Eyes

“It was a shack, somewhere out on the outskirts of the Plains town of Scrote. Scrote had a lot of outskirts, spread so widely-a busted cart here, a dead dog there-that often people went through it without even knowing it was there, and really it only appeared on the maps because cartographers get embarrassed about big empty spaces.”
― Terry Pratchett

“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

“It seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of towns, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“It was ... disconcerting to examine your charts before a proposed flight only to find that in many cases the bulk of the terrain over which you had to fly was bluntly marked: 'UNSURVEYED.'

It was as if the mapmakers had said, 'We are aware that between this spot and that one, there are several hundred thousands of acres, but until you make a forced landing there, we won't know whether it is mud, desert, or jungle -- and the chances are we won't know then!”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“I am not lying, the map that I drew was something that you would stop to look at. Audubon himself would have stopped and whistled, which is just what Mr. Barber did. Then he crouched next to me, and the sent of this coffee steamed up.
"Douglas, did you trace that?"
"Nope."
"And those seagulls?"
"I thought they would add realism."
"They're fantastic," Mr. Barber said.
"Thanks," I said.
He whistled again. Then he stood up and took a step.”
― Schmidt, Gary D.

“I realized that they make maps in their heads – scent maps, event maps, thing maps, texture maps, sequential maps – that much of their activity on the trails is mapmaking and map following. I know why Ben whines for me to open the car windows as we drive. His mapmaking needs the scent element. A ride in the car is mapmaking in the fast lane. New places, new smells, new maps, enlarge brains. The world is a newspaper. It is my world my dogs are mapping, my world they are imprinting. Now I pay attention to their world: the tree limb, the new hole, the crushed hay where to deer slept. I begin to tread as they do. I am allowed, as I learn to pay attention, to participate, as my dogs do, in the wonders of the natural world, a world from which I had grown far apart.”
― Rhoda Lerman, In the Company of Newfies: A Shared Life

“But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking; Dachau.”
― W.H. Auden, Journey to a War

“Robert Burton was right: maps are a certain cure for melancholy.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

“My own heart
neither so brave nor so willing
– leaving no lines on the maps
yet silently evolving”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides