224 Quotes About Maps

I think its a terrible invention. Nobody knows how to read a map anymore. You chase down a blue line but you have no idea where you are in the world. Like a rat in a maze. How do I ever know where I am in relation to Pikes Peak, or the South Platte? Or God?

Plenty of blanks in the world's charts. There will have to be a lot surveying before all of them are filled in.

If you're going to have a complicated story,' he once explained, 'you must work to a map; otherwisw you'll never make a of it afterwards'.

It was a shack, somewhere out on the outskirts of the Plains town of Scrote. Scrote had a lot of outskirts, spread so widely-a busted cart here, a dead dog there-that often people went through it without even knowing it was there, and really it only appeared on the maps because cartographers get embarrassed about big empty spaces.

I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. ... All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

They were maps that lived, maps that one could study, frown over, and add to; maps, in short, that really meant something.

Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that the often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all.

Folk like to pretend they know everything about the world. Rich folk especially. Maps are great for that. [...] You don't have blanks on your map, so the folks who draw them shade in a piece and write, 'The Eld.' You might as well burn a hole right through the map for what good that does.

Uncharted territory,” I said. “The parts on the maps of our lives that we don’t understand. In cartographer’s language they call these places sleeping beauties.