Topographical Quotes & Sayings

For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by 'Africa,' by the word itself, by its flora and fauna, its topographical diversity and grandeur; but above all else, by the sheer variety of the colors of its people, from tan and sepia to jet and ebony. — Henry Louis Gates

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"
China, India, the Pacific, Albania
"and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you. — Paul Theroux

That was the moment when he grasped that nobody wanted to use their minds. People wanted peace. They wanted to eat and sleep and have other people be nice to them. What they didn't want to do was think. — Daniel Kehlmann

When he had first arrived, he had found London huge, odd, fundamentally incomprehensible, with only the Tube map, that elegant multicolored topographical display of underground railway lines and stations, giving it any semblance of order. Gradually he realized that the Tube map was a handy fiction that made life easier but bore no resemblance to the reality of the shape of the city above. It was like belonging to a political party, he thought once, proudly, and then, having tried to explain the resemblance between the Tube map and politics, at a party, to a cluster of bewildered strangers, he had decided in the future to leave political comment to others. — Neil Gaiman

The hypothesis [of Yahweh's Midianite-Kenite origin] is constructed on four bases:

[1] the narratives dealing with Moses' family and his Midianite in-laws;

[2] poetic texts which are understood to refer to the original residence of Yahweh;

[3] Egyptian topographical texts from the fourteenth to the twelfth century BCE dealing with the Edomite region in which the name Yahweh appears;

[4] and an interpretation of Cain as the eponymous ancestor of the Kenites and the mark of Cain as signifying affiliation to the Yahwistic cult community.

(p. 133)

(from 'The Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis Revisited and the Origins of Judah', JSOT 33.2 (2008): 131-153) — Joseph Blenkinsopp

We perceive the world the way we think in our minds about ourselves and that perception may be absolutely out of date or completely unreal. Fear is the consequence and also the best indicator that tells us we are using it as a defense mechanism against perceived (not real) threats out there. What we are the most scared of is not the world, but ourselves. — Ilda Dashi

I hope that the examples I have given have gone some way towards demonstrating that pedestrian touring in the later 1780s and the 1790s was not a matter of a few 'isolated affairs', but was a practice of rapidly growing popularity among the professional, educated classes, with the texts it generated being consumed and reviewed in the same way as other travel literature: compared, criticised for inaccuracies, assessed for topographical or antiquarian interest, and so on. — Robin Jarvis

For what need would I have to say, 'I believe,' if I already knew?

(from The Church is One) — Aleksey Khomiakov

Modern literary theory sees a similarity between walking and writing that I find persuasive: words inscribe a text in the same way that a walk inscribes space. In The practicse of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau writes, 'The act of walking is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian; it is a special acting-out of the place ... and it implies relations among differentiated positions.' I think this is a fancy way of saying that writing is one way of making the world our own, and that walking is another. — Geoff Nicholson

If you allow yourself to deepen with midlife, your experience of everything deepens, including your experience of God. — Marianne Williamson

Because these show are live, script pages are being switched during the program and new commercial teases might be yelled in your ear with just enough time to scribble them on scrap paper before reading them. — Randy West

He could see. And he walked along, feeling the joy of a man who sees, a joy that a man tends to forget in sufficient light. — Wendell Berry

Damn it, why was he wondering about her? Why did he feel this need to know everything about an impertinent, managing, none-too-pretty female? But he did. Oh, he did not want to engage in anything so gauche or peril-fraught as inquiry. He merely wanted a reference - the comprehensive cotex of all things Amelia Claire d'Orsay. A chart of her ancestry back to the Norman invaders. The catalogue listing every book she'd ever read. A topographical map indicating the precise location of every freckle on her skin. — Tessa Dare

Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been. — David Crystal

The power of prayer is a prophecy. — Lailah Gifty Akita

If you've never stayed at a hostel in Europe, consider yourself lucky. The sheets' stains look like a topographical map, and the mattresses feel like they've been through a Sharknado. You feel like you need a shower after you take a shower. And the wannabe hippies sleeping in the Che and anarchist shirts on the half-dozen bunks around you smell and snore and make you yearn for the relative opulence of an American truck stop. — Michelle Fields

Few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind. — Salman Rushdie

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

How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism. — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

The doors of the darkest room one had ever seen were opened
and everyone was asked to collect the pieces of themselves that they have lost with time all these years. Everyone rushed in and started searching for the pieces that would complete them but all of a sudden they saw the light in the room fading away, they turned around and saw the doors closing back again. They screamed and tried to run back but all of a sudden there were fences all around them, they lost their voice and helplessly stuck in there saw the doors closing. They lost themselves completely in the quest of searching the pieces they had lost before. — Akshay Vasu

I never started out trying to be an actor. That was not my passion, this was not my thing. — Rose McGowan

[ ... ] whose round face was a sad pink and white topographical map of adolescence. — John L. Parker Jr.

For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and restoration of function with the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated, potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender — Donna J. Haraway

It is place, permanent position in both the social and topographical sense, that gives us our identity. — J. B. Jackson

I'm very competitive. — Tyler Christopher

Banker-bashing: Should it not fall into the same category as bullying, persecution, racism and sexism? — Przemek Skwirczynski