Cartography Quotes

To lovers of adventure and novelty, Africa displays a most ample field. ~ James Rennell

The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein. ~ Jose Saramago

Trying to map the brain has often been called cartography for fools. ~ Anonymous

When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't
and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown. ~ Rebecca Solnit

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

Like many of the people quoted on this dust-cover, I have not read Carl King's book. I am confident, however, that my review still applies: So, You're a Creative Genius is the best book available on modern cartography. ~ Heather Anne Campbell

It is now one hour before dawn on a day in Jerusalem. The Dome of the Rock is open: Muslims are praying. The Wall is always open: the Jews are praying. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is open: the Christians are praying in several languages. The sun is rising over Jerusalem, its rays making the light Herodian stones of the Wall almost snowy - just as Josephus described it two thousand years ago - and then catching the glorious gold of the Dome of the Rock that glints back at the sun. The divine esplanade where Heaven and Earth meet, where God meets man, is still in a realm beyond human cartography. Only the rays of the sun can do it and finally the light falls on the most exquisite and mysterious edifice in Jerusalem. Bathing and glowing in the sunlight, it earns its auric name. But the Golden Gate remains locked, until the coming of the Last Days. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

Childhood is a branch of cartography. ~ Michael Chabon

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. ~ Christopher Barzak

Seriously, there ought to be a cartography class for women who want to map out a man's geography to remember fondly later. ~ Sierra Woods

Maps codify the miracle of existence. ~ Nicholas Crane

A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: Discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here... Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams. ~ Miles Harvey

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

The desert mocked the map-makers. ~ Dean F. Wilson

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. ~ Ursula Vernon