The Cartographers Quotes

“Maps are love letters written to times and places their makers had explored.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“I hope the maps are good where you are.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Cartography, at its heart, was about defining one's place in the world by creating charts and measurements. Nell had lived her life by that idea, that everything could be mapped according to references and thereby understood. But she could see now that she had been paying attention to the wrong references.
It was not a map alone that made a place real.
It was the people.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“We were going to breathe passion and life back into cartography and make it something no one had ever seen before.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Maps were love letters written to times and places their makers had explored. They did not control the territory- they told its stories.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Grief can raze a face far worse than ten times as many years. (Romi's chapter, Libby @p735/921).”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“The older woman stood back up at last, holding a single envelope in her hands. “This.” She paused, then handed it over to Nell. “I shouldn’t give it to you, but … once someone’s gone, I know how much even the smallest tokens can mean.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“You can’t find a place that doesn’t exist.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“The more accurate a map is, the more powerful we understand it to be- that is, the world is what makes the map real. But Otto G. Lindberg achieved something even more spectacular, even if it was by serendipity. His map made part of the world real...”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“He opened his arms, and she fell into his huge embrace.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“I’m glad someone was able to look out for you all those years that I couldn’t.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“I’m not the one who owes you anything. And here I still am,”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Nell's a Young. It was foolish to think we were going to be able to hide this forever.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“forgive you, Tam,” he finally said. “It isn’t your fault. You’ve been here so long, you don’t know what I’ve spent my life trying to achieve. Let me show you. Once you see, you’ll understand. You’ll see I was right all along. That I still can fix everything.” “It’s too late,” Felix said to him. “It’s been too late for a long time.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“The thing her mother had died for, and her father had given decades of his life for, and Nell had lost her career and her relationship with Felix for, even if she hadn’t known it at the time. Gone.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“I just wanted one thing,” he finally said. “Daniel and Nell could have her love, all of you could have her friendship, the whole world could have her brilliance. I just wanted one thing that could be ours. That’s all.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“To an outsider, there would have appeared to be no connection between them—but to someone like me, who knew what the burglar might have been looking for, the pattern stood out as bright as day.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“You were bleeding, and unconscious,” Eve said softly. “You’re our little Nell. We couldn’t leave you.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Unbelievable. All these years, and you still can’t let it go. You could have everything you want back, but you’d rather throw it all away just to beat him. To prove you were right.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Right,” she replied. “Just hand over the most valuable thing I might ever have worked on, the thing that might get me my job here back again, because you say so.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“It was still hard to believe that after tonight, she might no longer be just a design technician for knockoff art. And all she had to do was the easiest thing in the world—nothing. Just hand over the gas station highway map. The Agloe map, as she’d started thinking of it now that she knew its secret.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“They laughed, but there was a mercenary undercurrent to the joke that made Nell shiver. She glanced around the circle nervously as they all toasted again. Now, everyone looked a lot less friendly. And a lot more suspicious.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Ramona was technically a private rare and antique maps dealer, a consultant who worked with wealthy clients to help them build their personal collections, but dealer was not what her father and Swann called Ramona on the rare occasions she came up in conversation.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“She could hardly fathom it. This was academia, for crying out loud. Rivals wrote counterarguments and published rebuttal papers. They didn’t kill.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“If there was anything more tragic than the disgraceful demise of Nell’s career, it had been the untimely end to her mother’s: Dr. Tamara Jasper-Young.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“How many years had her life been only her small, dingy apartment, endless subway rides, and the cramped offices of Classic? Everything on Fifth Avenue was three times brighter and louder, as if someone had turned up a dial on every surface.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Even to this day, the Fra Mauro map was considered one of the finest pieces of medieval cartography in existence.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Ogni fallimento ha un suo valore [...] Ci mostra cosa non funziona e ci avvicina a capire cosa funzionerà.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“We tend to think of maps as perfectly accurate - after all, that's the point of them. What good would a map that lied be? But in fact, many maps do just that. Unbeknownst to almost everyone who unfolds one and trusts it to take them to where they want to go, there's a long-standing secret practice among cartographers of hiding intentional errors - phantom settlements - in their works.

Most of the time, these intentional errors are so small and well disguised, they're never found. But every once in a while, a phantom settlement doesn't stay a phantom.

Sometimes, something magical happens.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Maps were love letters written to times and places their makers had explored. They did not control the territory - they told its stories.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers