Quotes & Sayings About Maps And Cartography

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

Mapping and visualization is a huge area of work and is of interest to many people. We're working on reinventing a new kind of 3D cartography to make it easier to tell stories with 3D maps. — Jack Dangermond

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

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

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

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. — Patrick Rothfuss

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

I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going
in a sense it's three tenses in one. — Peter Greenaway

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

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. — Terry Pratchett

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

Maps codify the miracle of existence. — Nicholas Crane