“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.”

“A little, round, fat, oily man of God.”

“People don't get it. He didn't even have a fuckin' map; what kind of idiot? THAT was the point. There's no blank spots on the map anymore, anywhere on earth. If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind.”

“I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.”

“So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o'er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.”

“The map is not the territory … The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map…”

“No map contains all the information about the territory it represents. The road map we get at the gasoline station may show all the roads in the state, but it will not as a rule show latitude and longitude. A physical map goes into details about the topography of a country but is indifferent to political boundaries. Furthermore, the scale of the map makes a big difference. The smaller the scale the less features will be shown.”

“These are roads to take when you think of your country
and interested bring down the maps again,
phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend,
reading the papers with morning inquiry.”

“I am alone here in my own mind.
There is no map
and there is no road.
It is one of a kind
just as yours is.”

“People who know and love the same books as you, have the road map to your soul.”