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Quote by Miles Harvey

“A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: Discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here... Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams.”

Quote by Miles Harvey

Work

The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime

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Author

Miles Harvey

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“Maps? There are no maps. I go by dark ways, unclean ways. If such a map existed, it would be beyond price. Nameless cults would battle in the low places of the earth for such a price. Dreamers would starve themselves in endless visions seeking its location. Such a map would have to be drawn on the skin of a black he-goat, in virgin's blood, with a brush made of dragon's eyelashes. The cartographer would go mad, and it would profane the hands that touched it.”