224 Quotes About Maps

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!

Fradique looked intensely at me. 'You are the proof that God exists,' he said, 'and that he is quite mad'. He leaned towards me and kissed me, and I kissed him. Later we went back to looking at the maps, and played a game of chess. I asked him what he had meant when he spoke about God's madness. Fradique laughed. 'Only a thoroughly insane God could conceive of an angel, and then place her in Hell.

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.

I’ve come to understand the cumulative dialogue of my work as a kind of cartography of wisdom about our emerging world. This book is a map in words to important territory we all are on now together. It’s a collection of pointers that treat the margins as seriously as the noisy center. For change has always happened in the margins, across human history, and it’s happening there now. Seismic shifts in common life, as in geophysical reality, begin in spaces and cracks.

Don't ask me for names. In this damned place all names are damned, and besides none of the maps know them. Here the earth devours itself. I don't imagine a fissure at the bottom of the ravine, I imagine a mouth!

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.

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

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.

That old man over thereIs selling trinkets made of stonesThat old woman the entire worldIn a map without any hole!