map quotes

Steven Wright

"I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it."

"I have a map of the United States... actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. I also have a full-size map of the world. I hardly ever unroll it."

The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll

He had brought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were very much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

"What’s the good of Mercator’s North Pole and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
"They are all just conventional signs!

Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes,
But we’ve got our Captain to thank"
(So the crew would protest) "that he’s bought the best.
A perfect and absolute blank!"

A Universal History of Infamy, Jorge Luis Borges

In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was the same scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point.