Maps Of Fictional Places Quotes

Where is this?" I asked. It wasn't a continent I recognized. David looked up from gathering a pile of laundry. "Oh. Um, that's Middle Earth. ~ Rachel Hawkins

Unlike any other creature on this planet, human beings can learn and understand without having experienced. They can think themselves into other peoples' places. Of course, this is a power like my brand of fictional magic that is morally neutral. One might use such a power to manipulate or control, just as much as to understand or sympathize. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or peer inside cages. They can close their hearts and minds to any suffering that does not touch them personally. They can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think that they have any fewer nightmares than I do. ~ J.K. Rowling

Creating a new place (fictional) for your character's purpose in a story is sometimes necessary. However, when I write, I try to think of already realistic settings. Places I know already exists. Some I have seen, personally. So when the readers know the places I mention; they become curious about them. They explore with wonder. In that,I feel I did my part as an author. I made a fictional story inspire life into an extraordinary reality. ~ M.A. Levi

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Fictional characters exist in only two places, neither of which is on the printed page. They exist, first, in the mind of the writer and, second, in the mind of the reader. ~ Maren Elwood

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go. ~ Ann Brashares

This is magic we're talking about. It's supposed to go places science can't, defy logic, wink at technology, fill us all with the sensawunda that comes of gazing upon a fictional world and seeing something truly different from our own. ~ N.K. Jemisin

When we talk about dystopias, especially in young adult fiction, a lot of them are essentially science fictional futures. They aren't necessarily tied to the traditional concept of dystopia. And so in that space, my impression is that kids love reading about weird, wild, adventurous places, and dystopia fits that bill. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

The name has always occupied a space between the concrete and the abstract, the individual and the social, but when it begins to be shaped and charged with meaning in places removed from the physical world, in that way entertaining the world of fiction, albeit unseen by the majority, at the same time as this fictional world is expanding and taking up an ever greater part of our lives - the TV screens are now not only in our own rooms, but also on the walls of our trains and under the luggage bins of our planes, in the waiting rooms of our doctors' offices and the halls of our banks, even in the supermarkets, quite apart from our carrying them around in the form of laptop computers and cell phones, in such a way that we inhabit two realities, one abstract and image-based, in which all kinds of people and places present themselves before us with nothing in common but being somewhere other than where we are, and one concrete, physical, which is the one we move around in and are more palpably a part of - when we arrive at a point where everything is either fiction or seen as fiction, the job of the novelist can no longer be to write more fiction. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones. ~ Joanne Harris

[Author's note:] When I decided to write this book, I worried that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I would get things wrong, as I may well have. I worried that, as a non-immigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it. But then I thought, 'If you're a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?' So I began.

In the early days of my research, before I'd fully convinced myself that I should undertake the telling of this story, I was interviewing a very generous scholar, a remarkable woman who was chair of the Chicana and Chicano studies Department at San Diego State University. Her name is Norma Iglesias Prieto, and I mentioned my doubts to her. I told her I felt compelled, but unqualified, to write this book. She said, "Jeanine. We need as many voices as we can get, telling this story." Her encouragement sustained me for the next four years.

I was careful and deliberate in my research. I traveled extensively on both sides of the border and learned as much as I could about Mexico and migrants, about people living throughout the borderlands. The statistics in this book are all true, and though I changed some names, most of the places are real, too. But the characters, while representative of the folks I met during my travels, are fictional. ~ Jeanine Cummins

It wasn't that we didn't know history. Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people. We'd been taught about cavemen and Normans and Tudors. We knew about Greeks and Romans. We knew masses of personal stories about World War II. We even knew quite a lot of family history. It just didn't connect to the landscape. And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one. In ignorance, we played our way through what the elves and giants had left us, taking the fairies' possession for ownership. I named the dramroads after places in The Lord of the Rings when I should have recognized that they were from The Chrysalids. ~ Jo Walton

I feel like these characters, these places, these beings and plots, and even these inanimate objects are counting on me for survival. It's my responsibility to reveal them to the world, to show my readers the names of these things, to show them their histories and stories. ~ Nicholas Trandahl

All the seeds of Christianity -- of superstition, were sown in my mind and
cultivated with great diligence and care.

All that time I knew nothing of any science -- nothing about the other side -- nothing of the objections that had been urged against the blessed Scriptures, or against the perfect Congregational creed. Of course I had heard the ministers speak of blasphemers, of infidel wretches, of scoffers who laughed at holy things. They did not answer their arguments, but they tore their characters into shreds and demonstrated by the fury of assertion that they had done the Devil's work. And yet in spite of all I heard -- of all I read. I could not quite believe. My brain and heart said No.

For a time I left the dreams, the insanities, the illusions and delusions, the nightmares of theology. I studied astronomy, just a little -- I examined maps of the heavens -- learned the names of some of the constellations -- of some of the stars -- found something of their size and the velocity with which they wheeled in their orbits -- obtained a faint conception of astronomical spaces -- found that some of the known stars were so far away in the depths of space that their light, traveling at the rate of nearly two hundred thousand miles a second, required many years to reach this little world -- found that, compared with the great stars, our earth was but a grain of sand -- an atom – found that the old belief that all the hosts of heaven had been created for ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

It is its own form of conversation
you can learn a lot about people from the stories they tell, but you can also know them from the way they sing along, whether they like the windows up or down, if they live by the map or by the world, if they feel the pull of the ocean. ~ David Levithan

Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land. ~ Simon Van Booy

Fictional characters exert a great deal of influence over our choices in love by representing inaccessible ideals to which we try to make others conform, usually without success. But more subtly, too, the books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role. ~ Pierre Bayard

Among the map makers of each generation are the risk takers, those who see the opportunities, seize the moment and expand man's vision of the future ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course - for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers - but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, "They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves. ~ J.D. Vance

Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names of things. The glorious inrush of a word. The joy of chatter. Every color's wavelength, by number. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

He comes down next to me, and when I hold out my hand, he takes it. Our fingers lace together. And in that feeling, that perfect feeling of our hands and fingers pressed together, I want to tell him everything. I want to tell him about Josh, and his sister, Emily. I want to tell him about tall, crazy Gert. I want to tell him about bridges and funerals, and most of all, maps. More than anything else, I want to tell him about myself. I want to tell him that I know what things look like from above now. There's so much I want to tell him, because I know he'll understand. ~ Shawn Klomparens

The first thing I became interested in in terms of 'Brain Storm' was neuroscience, and that is like saying you're interested in the universe. So ultimately I knew if I was going to handle this in a fictional format, I would have to take a subsection of neuroscience, and that turned out to be the use of neuroscience in criminal courts. ~ Richard Dooling

I am a sailor, you're my first mate
We signed on together, we coupled our fate
Hauled up our anchor, determined not to fail
For the heart's treasure, together we set sail
With no maps to guide us, we steered our own course
Rode out the storms when the winds were gale force
Sat out the doldrums in patience and hope
Working together, we learned how to cope.
Life is an ocean and love it a boat
In troubled waters it keeps us afloat
When we started the voyage there was just me and you
Now gathered round us we have our own crew
Together we're in this relationship
We built it with care to last the whole trip
Our true destination's not marked on any chart
We're navigating the shores of the heart ~ John McDermott

On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. ~ William Least Heat-Moon

We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds. At ~ Bill Bryson

But people do the same thing with the Bible. They memorize all the fictional characters, the parameters and the rules of the game and think it's important, but I can't get excited about that myself. ~ Brad Warner

Writing novels allows the novelist to spend much of his time in a fictional world, which is really the only or at least the most bearable place to be. ~ Javier Marias

I think that a lot of people have a longing to move out of the present. The present is very constricting. You can't go back to your past, you can't go ahead to see what's in your future, so you have to put up with whatever is here now. People have a deep longing to think about something else and move into a fictional world and also to feel there are other possibilities than just everyday reality. I don't think time travel is actually possible, but as a metaphor it is interesting. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Handsome, fictional men were so much easier to stomach than real life ones who smelled of Christmas and looked like a Calvin Klein model ~ Tarryn Fisher

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon. ~ Will Self

Her areas of expertise are bar codes, book titles and maps - she has an original Parker Brothers map of the world. ~ Jasper Fforde

Cultivate the habit of setting clearly-defined written goals; they are the road maps that guide you to your destination. ~ Roy Bennett

She supposed they were imperfections, those marks, but they didn't feel that way to her; they were a history, cut into his body: the map of a life of endless war. ~ Cassandra Clare

As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect, that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, unapproachable bogs, Scythian ice, or a frozen sea, so, in this work of mine, in which I have compared the lives of the greatest men with one another, after passing through those periods which probable reasoning can reach to and real history find a footing in, I might very well say of those that are farther off, beyond this there is nothing but prodigies and fictions, the only inhabitants are the poets and inventors of fables; there is no credit, or certainty any farther. ~ Plutarch

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

Had I been too selfish? I had never known my mother, but I knew my life as it had been without her: the ship, the sea, the myths, the maps . . . and, yes, Kashmir. The pain I felt at the thought of losing him - the same pain that kept me at arm's length - gave me a hint of my father's own struggle. ~ Heidi Heilig

When You Return

Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes. The egg,
bald yolk and its transparent halo,
slide back in the thin, calcium shell.
Curses will pour back into mouths,
letters un-write themselves, words
siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair
will darken and become the feathers
of a black swan. Bullets will snap
back into their chambers, the powder
tamped tight in brass casings. Borders
will disappear from maps. Rust
revert to oxygen and time. The fire
return to the log, the log to the tree,
the white root curled up
in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly
into the lark's lungs, answers
become questions again.
When you return, sweaters will unravel
and wool grow on the sheep.
Rock will go home to mountain, gold
to vein. Wine crushed into the grape,
oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in
to the spider's belly. Night moths
tucked close into cocoons, ink drained
from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds
will be returned to coal, coal
to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light
to stars sucked back and back
into one timeless point, the way it was
before the world was born,
that fresh, that whole, nothing
broken, nothing torn apart. ~ Ellen Bass

Reading for me, was like breathing. It was probably akin to masturbation for my brain. Getting off on the fantasy within the pages of a good novel felt necessary to my survival. If I wasn't asleep, knitting, or working, I was reading. This was for several reasons, all of them focused around the infititely superior and enviable lives of fictional heroines to real-life people.
Take romans for instance. Fictional women in romance novels never get their period. They never have morning breath. They orgasm seventeen times a day. And they never seem to have jobs with bosses.
These clean, well-satisfied, perm-minty-breathed women have fulfilling careers as florists, bakery owners, hair stylists or some other kind of adorable small business where they decorate all day. If they do have a boss, he's a cool guy (or gal) who's invested in the woman's love life. Or, he's a super hot billionaire trying to get in her pants.
My boss cares about two things: Am I on time ? Are all my patients alive and well at the end of my shift?
And the mend in the romance novels are too good to be true; but I love it, and I love them. Enter stage right the independently wealthy venture capitalist suffering from the ennui of perfection until a plucky interior decorator enters stage left and shakes up his life and his heart with perky catch phrases and a cute nose that wrinkles when she sneezes.
I suck at decorating. The walls of my apartment are bare. I am allergic to most sto ~ Penny Reid

Science fiction in particular is often assumed to be about the future, or about some abstract technological or philosophical idea, or just about 'adventure,' but writers can't build worlds out of nothing. We use bits and pieces of the real world to assemble our fictional ones. ~ Ann Leckie