Melanie Knight

“The photograph that will help this moment and this day live for ever more.”
― David Almond, Island

“As Joshua Jelly-Schapiro said one day, every map is a story, and by implication every story contains a map. I loved maps for a long time, but it wasn’t until I made them and put them out in the world that I discovered how not alone I was. People love maps. There is a special incandescent joy to how they respond to a good map that is different from the way I’ve seen people to respond to any other art form. They light up. They get greedily engrossed. They start tracing possibilities, thinking, interpreting, measuring: maps demand work, and this kind of cerebral work can be exhilarating. By a good map I mean an aesthetic one, a map that is an invitation to the imagination, a map that offers a fresh view of the familiar or an introduction to the unfamiliar or finds the latter in the former. If every map is a story, most of them are mysteries that invite you to solve them while remaining forever unresolved, in that they indicate more - more past, more future, more adventure, more travelers. They have an openness, indicating more than they depict.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas

“I think there has always been death and destruction,' says Dark Star. 'Civilisation is always about to fall. So there has been a shooting and a bomb. But how many car crashes have there been today? How many people have been killed by cancer? And why do we talk only about the bad things?'
'That's right,' says Dad. 'The news is skewed. It doesn't tell us how many babies have been born today.' He puts his arm around the woman's waist. 'It doesn't tell us how many women and men have fallen in love today.”
― David Almond, Island

“He exposes the star tattoo at the centre of his chest. He points to it.
'This is the star at the centre of the universe,' he says. 'Wherever I go in the tent of my skin, I am at the centre.”
― David Almond, Island