Maps Quotes

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 More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I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

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

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

Nature doesn’t need knowledge, because nature is knowledge, knowledge manifest.

~ Martin Pretchel

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

I just don’t know where to go from here, Alex.”“You don’t have to, we can trace our map together.

~ Emiliano Campuzano

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

~ Roseanne Barr

Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round . . . The sky is round and I have heard the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind in its greatest power whirls, birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. Our teepees were round like the nests of birds. And they were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop.

~ Chief Black Elk

Like a spider in its web, a vibration anywhereis felt everywhere.

~ Lois Farfel Stark

SEE what you think.

~ Lois Farfel Stark

Good… Bad? I’m not here to judge where you’re at or where you’ve been. I’m simply here to encourage you in where you would like to go. You have the map; I’ll shine the light on it so you can better read it. And eventually, the sun will rise again in your life and you’ll no longer need my light to assist you.

~ Alaric Hutchinson

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

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

A ship that sails without a compass will get lost at sea.

~ Matshona Dhliwayo

I am an agnostic on most matters of faith, but on the subject of maps I have always been a true believer. It is on the map, therefore it is, and I am.

~ Tony Horwitz

Life has no map; it's made of random events, always caused by something beyond your control.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

The map? I will first make it.

~ Patrick White

There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. I have listened to accounts by such travelers in which every road number was remembered, every mileage recalled, and every little countryside discovered. Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed at every moment, as though there were some kind of safety in black and red lines, in dotted indications and squirming blue of lakes and the shadings that indicate mountains. It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states.

~ John Steinbeck

Consulting maps can diminish the wanderlust that they awaken,as the act of looking at them can replace the act of travel. But looking at maps is much more than an act of aesthetic replacement. Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits--the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world.

~ Judith Schalansky

There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures. Each part assumes its proper dimensions: continents are not looked at in the light of islands, or islands considered as mere specks, which are, in truth, larger than many kingdoms of Europe. Africa, or North and South America, are well-sounding names, and easily pronounced; but it is not until having sailed for weeks along small portions of their shores, that one is thoroughly convinced what vast spaces on our immense world these names imply.

~ Charles Darwin

Maps are essential. Planning a journey without a map is like building a house without drawings.

~ Mark Jenkins

The barrier to our future is often the very plans that we’ve created to get there.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

Even after three hundred maps have been handed out, Ama and I still melt the moment people switch from being suspicious that we want to sell them something--Hey? What do you want? Money? Directions?--to realising that we just want to know their stories, their memories, what they love--Oh, in that case, thanks, sweeties!

~ Becky Cooper

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

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

A story is a map of the world. A gloriously colored and wonderful map, the sort one often sees framed and hanging on the wall in a study full of plush chairs and stained-glass lamps: painstakingly lettered, researched down to the last pebble and participle, drawn with dash and flair, with cloud-goddesses in the corners and giant squid squirming up out of the sea...[T]here are more maps in the world than anyone can count. Every person draws a map that shows themselves at the center.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

When I looked at a map in town, Rhode Island seemed lost up there in the corner. A state so small and crowded, there didn't seem to be room for a person at all.

~ Michelle Hoover

Arrogance is a map of a road that leads to bridges that are out.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Intuitions are like migratory birds, they come without a map without a reason.

~ Amit Ray

Maps codify the miracle of existence.

~ Nicholas Crane

The United States has never been in a united state, it has never been a united state. It never will. Lines on screens and paper do not change that.

~ Justin K. Mcfarlane Beau

Google maps are one thing but there's no substitute for pounding the beat and I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to break into the back of the houses on Belgrave Place. Once I even for followed by a suspicious householder - I'd been hanging around staring at the exterior of his flat for too long.

~ Sara Sheridan

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

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

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: 'UNSURV

~ Beryl Markham

As a historical novelist, there is very little I like more than spending time sorting through boxes of old letters, diaries, maps, trinkets, and baubles.

~ Sara Sheridan

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald