Maps of the Imagination Quotes

“To ask for a map is to say, “Tell me a story.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“A story or novel is a kind of map because, like a map, it is not a world, but it evokes one (or at least one, for each reader.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“On the most fundamental level, all fiction rests on the unwritten statement, 'This is fiction.' The reader is, traditionally, asked to ignore that knowledge, but the reader needs to have it, nevertheless; otherwise, everything that follows would be an act of miscommunication. *In the last century and in this one, an increasing number of writers as diverse as John Barth, Tim O'Brien, and David Shields have made that very issue the subject of their work. Such writing rests heavily on the awareness that we bring different expectations and assumptions to prose that calls itself 'fiction.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“Wise men contemplate the world,” he thinks, “knowing full well that they are contemplating themselves.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“Our only remaining hope and salvation,” Bacon wrote, “is to begin the whole labor of the mind again, not leaving it to itself but directing it perpetually from the very first.” A century later, William Herschel agreed. Herschel, the first man to understand that telescopes penetrate time as well as space, spent the long daylight hours polishing his lenses, listening to his sister read from Don Quixote and the Thousand and One Nights. When darkness fell, his lenses clear, he discovered a heretofore unknown planet.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“Postmodern” has been defined too many ways, by too many people, to be simply adopted. “Postrealist” is both more inclusive and more direct: having discovered and explored realism, artists have gone on to try any number of other methods, no one of which has clearly replaced realism—which trundles on like the crocodile, unaware that dinosaurs are extinct.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“In that version of the story, Atlas is less literal holder of the world than beholder of it; he alone among mortals can contemplate the divine and take measure of the cosmos.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“Our descriptions are an acknowledgment of our unspoken agreement with the reader that we are not simply telling a tale but evoking an imaginary world.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“The desire to replicate the—or a—viewer’s view is realism’s reason for being.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“We need to keep in mind the distinction between realism and reality. To confuse the two is to lose sight of the difference between art and life.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“Nothing can remain immense if it can be measured.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“WE CHART OUR CITIES, so we chart ourselves. To chart the external world is to reveal ourselves—our priorities, our interests, our desires, our fears, our biases. We believe we’re mapping our knowledge, but in fact we’re mapping what we want—and what we want others—to believe. In this way, every map is a reflection of the individual or group that creates it. By “reading” a map, by studying it, we share, however temporarily, those beliefs. This explains why we can enjoy, collect, and hang on our walls maps of places we’ve never been and never expect to go to—even places that don’t exist. Because the map takes us there.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“We compile mental maps that are wildly skewed, a mental atlas so large and complex that we can never fully convey it to anyone else. Then we live in the world those maps create.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“The challenge is not only what to select for telling and how to present it, but how to evoke, simultaneously, the Theater of the World—how to make the leap from ego-vision to omnivision.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“A prerequisite for finding our way through any story or novel is to be lost: the journey can’t begin until we’ve been set down in a place somehow unfamiliar.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“As readers, we are content, even delighted, to be lost, in the sense that we are both absorbed and uncertain of where we are or where we are going, as long as we feel confident we are following a guide who has not only the destination but our route to it clearly in mind.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“Every map intends not simply to serve us but to influence us.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“How we see depends, in part, on what we want to see.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“The first lie of a map—also the first lie of fiction—is that it is the truth.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“In the nineteenth century, maps often indicated watering holes for horses.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“More ominously, Native American tribal areas were not included on early European maps of the Americas, giving readers of those maps the impression no one lived there—at least, no one of consequence. No landowners. These are the kinds of blanks that fire Marlow’s imagination in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—the blanks that certain minds found to be a call for colonialism and conquest.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“To learn how to read any map is to be indoctrinated into that mapmaker’s culture.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“A map may be beautiful, but if it doesn’t tell us what we want to know, or clearly illustrate what it means to tell us, it’s merely a decoration.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“Nevertheless, in every piece we write, we contemplate a world; and as that world would not otherwise exist, we create it even as we discover it.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“ARTISTIC CREATION is a voyage into the unknown.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“The purpose of a story or poem, unlike that of a diary, is not to record our experience but to create a context for, and to lead the reader on, a journey.”
― Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer