Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

I would stare at maps of Delaware for hours.

I had the Big Horn river explored from Wind River mountain to my place of embarkation.

Cartography and geographic thinking are cool.

For some reason the most devoted mapheads seem to be kids.

There was a time when a man was so convinced that the world was round that he was determined to prove it.

I would read the atlas for pleasure. I knew it was weird. It was weird.

Some persons were to be sent in search of the river Missouri in order to discover whether it had any communication with the Pacific Ocean …

I propose to construct a new chart for navigating, on which I shall delineate all the sea and lands of the Ocean in their proper positions under their bearings; and further, I propose to prepare a book, and to put down all as it were in a picture, by latitude from the equator, and western longitude.

Mapping, both literal and metaphorical, has always been about our quest for knowing.

The earliest maps were 'story' maps. Cartographers were artists who mingled knowledge with supposition, memory and fears. Their maps described both landscape and the events, which had taken place within it, enabling travellers to plot a route as well as to experience a story.

Geography was the lesson I always looked forward to most. It was a form of escapism. It could be bleak midwinter outside but inside you're learning about African farming methods or the Great Lakes. No other lesson had that excitement.

We were just looking at maps.

They were maps that lived, maps that one could study, frown over, and add to; maps, in short, that really meant something.

I [had] added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me.

The world is a globe — the farther you sail, the closer to home you are.

Your map of Africa is really quite nice. But my map of Africa lies in Europe. Here is Russia, and here... is France, and we're in the middle — that's my map of Africa.

Amusingly, Christopher Columbus totally bungled ... by relying on subsequent less-accurate calculations and confusing Arabic miles with Italian miles, concluding that he needed to sail only 3,700 km to reach the Orient when the true value was 19,600 km. He clearly wouldn’t have gotten his trip funded if he’d done his math right, and he clearly wouldn’t have survived if America hadn’t existed, so sometimes being lucky is more important than being right.

Most Americans have no clue that before there were highways, there were only waterways to get through the wilderness. If you weren't on a lake or a river, you were in a jungle.

I live in the sky as a pilot, so it has great meaning to me.

One of my favorite ways to find fictional inspiration, by the way, is to browse historical timelines. I also like world atlases - any country with a squiggly coastline seems to inspire me, as do visual dictionaries, those reclusive creatures of the reference shelf.

Without geography you're nowhere.

Phoney: Here's your problem Fone Bone! We're off the map! Get a bigger map!

Ten geographers who think the world is flat will tend to reinforce each other's errors ... Only a sailor can set them straight.

I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going -- in a sense it's three tenses in one.

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