the maps QUOTES

1 " The closest I ever got to Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms was when I bought the box game set for the latter (I think this was before the novels came out). I well recall this—we were living in James Bay, in Victoria. We opened the box up and took out the maps while sitting in a Mexican restaurant. Ten minutes later I was as close as I have ever been to publicly burning someone else’s creation…What bothered us was the reworking of every fantasy cliché imaginable, all in one package now, and none of it made sense. "

― Steven Erikson

2 " They rolled up the maps of their bodies until they were two continents of interlocking roads and rivers and dreams, and she thought, ‘This is how I will learn to live again’. "

― Kate Scelsa , Fans of the Impossible Life

3 " Just because the ones we love die (or fall out of our lives or disappear from the spinning of our spheres) does not mean we love them any less or erase them from the deeply etched lines of the maps we have traveled.

We find ways to keep them alive in spirit, with the brutal knowing that they are gone in body.

We can remember; we can feel & this can all be grief & it can all be love, too. "

― Bryonie Wise

4 " Estragon: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy. "

― Samuel Beckett , Waiting for Godot

5 " Today, unlocking the room and stepping into its dusty embrace, it struck her – the bareness, the

cobwebs in the corners, the dark squares on the walls where the maps had once hung, the

intricately designed tiles disappeared in filth, the urn-less, roseless emptiness, the laughter that

once was. Sighs everywhere, and echoes, the papery trail of ants through the ancient wood, the still,

suspended sheets of dust, and through it all, those memories, still alive, still alive. "

― , The Courtesans of Karim Street

6 " Then where is home, Johannes?" He looks at the maps on his wall. " I don't know," He says. " Where comfort is. And that is hard to find. "

7 " In two months, I think, my college job will end. In two months I will have no office, no college, no salary, no home. Everything will be different. But, I think, everything already is. When Alice dropped down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland she fell so slowly she could take things from the cupboards and bookshelves on the walls, look curiously at the maps and pictures that passed her by. In my three years as a Cambridge Fellow there’d been lectures and libraries and college meetings, supervisions, admissions interviews, late nights of paper-writing and essay-marking, and other things soaked in Cantabrian glamour: eating pheasant by candlelight at High Table while snow dashed itself in flurries against the leaded glass and carols were sung and the port was passed and the silver glittered upon dark-polished refectory tables. Now, standing on a cricket pitch with a hawk on my hand, I knew I had always been falling as I moved past these things. I could reach out and touch them, pick them off their shelves and replace them, but they were not mine. Not really ever mine. Alice, falling, looked down to see where she was headed, but everything below her was darkness. "

― Helen Macdonald , H is for Hawk

8 " The bravest battle that ever was fought Shall I tell you where and when? On the maps of the world you will find it not It was fought by the mothers of men. "