Map Quotes

“I want to learn how to speak to anyone at any time and make us both feel a little bit better, lighter, richer, with no commitments of ever meeting again. I want to learn how to stand wherever with whoever and still feel stable. I want to learn how to unlock the locks to our minds, my mind, so that when I hear opinions or views that don’t match up with mine, I can still listen and understand. I want to burn up lifeless habits of following maps and to-do lists, concentrated liquids to burn my mind and throat
and I want to go back to the way nature shaped me. I want to learn to go on well with whatever I have in my hands at the moment
in a natural state of mind,
certain like the sea.

I will find comfort in the rhythm of the sea.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“We were just looking at maps...”
― Rick Riordan, The Battle of the Labyrinth

“The best parts of life are the things we can't plan. And it's a lot harder to find happiness if you're only searching in one place. Sometimes, you just have to throw away the map. Admit that you don't know where you're going and stop pressuring yourself to figure it out. Besides...a map is a life someone else already lived. It's more fun to make your own.”
― Cora Carmack, Finding It

“Is that all we have left? Is that all we are? Lights on a map that are slowly dying, hanging on for nothing?”
― Carrie Ryan, The Dead-Tossed Waves

“The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it.”
― Cara Black, Murder in the Bastille

“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

“I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.”
― Steven Wright

“What is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons?”
― Terry Pratchett

“A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”
― Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics

“When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.
The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. There is a lot that you can't change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey . . .”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

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

“There isn’t a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights.”
― Mark Twain

“A map was a fine thing to study when you were disposed to think of something else, being made up of names that would turn into a chime if you went back upon them.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“A novel is a tricky thing to map.”
― Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“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

“We only pass this way once..unless our significant other is reading the map..”
― kjforce

“Sanity is the thread through the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Once cut, or unravelled, all that lies in wait are gloomy tunnels unfathomable by any map, and what hides there is a beast in human form, wearing our own face.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“The only place you’ll find a map of Blackcliff,” a raspy voice intrudes, “is in the Commandant’s head. And I don’t think you want to go rummaging around in there.”
― Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes

“I looked at the map of India on the wall. Every 14-year-old should know the exact location of Calcutta. It wouldn't do to go around without the faintest clue of where Calcutta was.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“The desert mocked the map-makers.”
― Dean F. Wilson, Hopebreaker

“The closest map of the future is what we write today.”
― Alan Maiccon

“Today's map of our modern world is the result of invasions and divisions by the military, and political forces; however, not the real will of all people.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“I have an existential map; it has 'you are here' written all over it.”
― Steven Wright

“Walking is mapping with your feet”
― Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London

“It doesn’t matter how much you drive around, you will never get to where you want to go if you don’t have the right map.”
― Stanley Rosenberg, Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve: Self-Help Exercises for Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, and Autism

“I was eleven when everything started and twelve by the end. But that’s another way that maps don’t tell the whole truth – because it felt like the distance I travelled was a lot further than that.”
― Danielle Binks, The Year the Maps Changed

“History is the gift of a map already written by those who authored the map in the very walking of it.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“A map is only one story. It is not the most important story. The most important story is the one a people tell about themselves.”
― Nicole Chung, A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home

“These are the routes she just left. They are yours now.” Handing me the map, I see that it’s creases are already worn white and water warps the top of it. It is hope, folded up and ready to carry in my pack.”
― Corinne Beenfield, Where Green Meets Blue

“Eine Weltkarte, in der das Land Utopia nicht verzeichnet ist, verdient keinen Blick, denn sie lässt die eine Küste aus, wo die Menschheit ewig landen wird.
Und wenn die Menschheit da angelangt ist, hält sie Umschau nach einem besseren Land und richtet ihre Segel dahin. Der Fortschritt ist die Verwirklichung von Utopien.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900”
― Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World