Peng Shepherd > Quotes

“Maps are love letters written to times and places their makers had explored.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“There’s a difference between when the mind forgets and the heart does.”
― Peng Shepherd

“Libraries have always been mysterious, almost mystical places to me. There’s something about the sheer vastness of them, the seemingly infinite number of books they protect and keep, that inspires a sense of wonder, making each visit feel like a quest for ancient secrets. Whenever I step into one, I always wander the stacks, choosing books by some invisible pull rather than by the author’s name or the catalog. It’s not efficient, but I can’t help it. It feels more magical this way.”
― Peng Shepherd

“I hope the maps are good where you are.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Cartography, at its heart, was about defining one's place in the world by creating charts and measurements. Nell had lived her life by that idea, that everything could be mapped according to references and thereby understood. But she could see now that she had been paying attention to the wrong references.
It was not a map alone that made a place real.
It was the people.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Time always leaves you behind.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Book of M

“We were going to breathe passion and life back into cartography and make it something no one had ever seen before.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Love is not something that happens to a person, but something a person does for another person, every day, every moment.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Future Library

“Maps were love letters written to times and places their makers had explored. They did not control the territory- they told its stories.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Grief can raze a face far worse than ten times as many years. (Romi's chapter, Libby @p735/921).”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Then I saw it tilt its head ever so slightly to the side, all by itself. There was a moment of coldness, like the entire room had dropped twenty degrees. I tried to take a breath, but I couldn’t move. Then it was gone.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Book of M

“The older woman stood back up at last, holding a single envelope in her hands. “This.” She paused, then handed it over to Nell. “I shouldn’t give it to you, but … once someone’s gone, I know how much even the smallest tokens can mean.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“We need to take care of what we can do before we sit around and worry about what we cant.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Book of M

“You can’t find a place that doesn’t exist.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“I hope of all things, I forget you last, Ory. I hope I forget you even after I forget where we're going. I'd rather drive forever and never reach New Orleans, but still remember you”
― Peng Shepherd, The Book of M

“It was still hard to believe that after tonight, she might no longer be just a design technician for knockoff art. And all she had to do was the easiest thing in the world—nothing. Just hand over the gas station highway map. The Agloe map, as she’d started thinking of it now that she knew its secret.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“But this is the border between art and science. Two painters can sit before their easels facing the same subject, and their creations will turn out completely distinct. A map is not a painting, though. A map must depict only what is there—the truth—precisely and without interpretation. Thus, if two maps are both perfectly accurate, how would you actually prove that someone had stolen your work to make their own?”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“You were bleeding, and unconscious,” Eve said softly. “You’re our little Nell. We couldn’t leave you.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Ramona was technically a private rare and antique maps dealer, a consultant who worked with wealthy clients to help them build their personal collections, but dealer was not what her father and Swann called Ramona on the rare occasions she came up in conversation.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“We tend to think of maps as perfectly accurate - after all, that's the point of them. What good would a map that lied be? But in fact, many maps do just that. Unbeknownst to almost everyone who unfolds one and trusts it to take them to where they want to go, there's a long-standing secret practice among cartographers of hiding intentional errors - phantom settlements - in their works.

Most of the time, these intentional errors are so small and well disguised, they're never found. But every once in a while, a phantom settlement doesn't stay a phantom.

Sometimes, something magical happens.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Even to this day, the Fra Mauro map was considered one of the finest pieces of medieval cartography in existence.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“forgive you, Tam,” he finally said. “It isn’t your fault. You’ve been here so long, you don’t know what I’ve spent my life trying to achieve. Let me show you. Once you see, you’ll understand. You’ll see I was right all along. That I still can fix everything.” “It’s too late,” Felix said to him. “It’s been too late for a long time.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Unbelievable. All these years, and you still can’t let it go. You could have everything you want back, but you’d rather throw it all away just to beat him. To prove you were right.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“The memory means more, the more it’s worth to you—and to who you are.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Book of M

“If there was anything more tragic than the disgraceful demise of Nell’s career, it had been the untimely end to her mother’s: Dr. Tamara Jasper-Young.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“Right,” she replied. “Just hand over the most valuable thing I might ever have worked on, the thing that might get me my job here back again, because you say so.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“I just wanted one thing,” he finally said. “Daniel and Nell could have her love, all of you could have her friendship, the whole world could have her brilliance. I just wanted one thing that could be ours. That’s all.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“I imagined I understood better than anyone, after all. Wanting something to be true that never could be, and not wanting it to be true even more, because of what it would cost.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“How many years had her life been only her small, dingy apartment, endless subway rides, and the cramped offices of Classic? Everything on Fifth Avenue was three times brighter and louder, as if someone had turned up a dial on every surface.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers

“He opened his arms, and she fell into his huge embrace.”
― Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers