224 Quotes About Maps

Maps? There are no maps.I go by dark ways, unclean ways. If such a map existed, it would be beyond price. Nameless cults would battle in the low places of the earth for such a price. Dreamers would starve themselves in endless visions seeking its location.Such a map would have to be drawn on the skin of a black he-goat, in virgin's blood, with a brush made of dragon's eyelashes. The cartographer would go mad, and it would profane the hands that touched it.

For our one-month anniversary, he made me a picture map.A map of us.It’s years in the making, and it’s messy and convoluted, some of it even tragic. But I wouldn’t change the route, because we walked it together, even when we were apart. And the best part about it is that it’s unfinished. Uncertainty isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes it can even be filled with extraordinary potential.

It's easy to forget that old maps were once statements of the very latest in thinking: new visions brimming with the potential and power of up-to-date knowledge. The unknowns in such maps were warnings, certainly, but also became advertisements. When made visible on the chart they invited perilous new journeys as much as cautioned against them.

Sometimes the exact picture doesn't tell you enough. Sometimes the map is the truth, the picture is a lie.

The cartographers will not be pleased.

A map is not the territory and is not as interesting as the territory.

Once, centuries ago, a map was a thing of beauty, a testament not to the way things were but to the heights scaled by men's dreams.

Before dawn I heard Rob say that he thought we'd crossed the border into Mozambique. That made no sense to me, I had always assumed that a border was, if not a fence, at least a long ditch, a crack in the earth. I'd seen the lines on maps: black, unambiguous, imposing. I never considered those were made up.

Not unlike personal perspectives," Siwash said, "we rarely understand map projections that are not our own.