Ken Jennings Quotes

I would stare at maps of Delaware for hours.

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

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

I like geography. I like to know where places are.

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

For me, it started as a child with one of those little wooden jigsaw maps of the U.S., where's there's crocodiles on Florida and apples on Washington state. That was my very first map.

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.

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 …

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

As a child, I had always wanted to know what lay at the end of a corridor or behind a door in a picture, so I did a floorplan and elevations of Angelina's house and learned my way around it. The idea was that children should start to feel at home in it.

Without geography you're nowhere.

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

I have always had a love for American geography, and especially for the landscapes of the South. One of my pleasures has been to drive across it, with no one in the world knowing where I am, languidly absorbing the thoughts and memories of old moments, of people vanished now from my life.

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.