Ghost Map Quotes & Sayings

How to keep the seductive ghost of bliss long absconded from baiting you and hooking you and pulling you back out and eating your heart raw and (if you're lucky) eliminating your map for good. — David Foster Wallace

Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination. Unfortunately, our current culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth. If something can't be quantified and calculated, then it can't be true. Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn't how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness. — Jonah Lehrer

A little instruction in the elements of chartography - a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map - would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost. — Mary Antin