That old man over there Is selling trinkets made of stones That old woman the entire world In a map without any hole!

I speak to maps. And sometimes they something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps, the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable.

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.

I'd won the worldbut like aforsaken explorer,I'd lostmy map.

Under her thick pancake makeup, her sin had been pockmarked, but he would stare at her adoringly from his cot at night and imagine her scars were constellations, a secret map to a far-off, happy place.

What is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons?

Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

We were just looking at maps...

Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth, things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.

You don't throw a compass overboard because the ocean is calm.

A ship that sails without a compass will get lost at sea.

The heart is a wanderer, the mind is its map; love is its destination.