Geography Quotes

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
― Mark Twain

“(Media question to Beatles during first U.S. tour 1964)
"How do you find America?"
"Turn left at Greenland.”
― Ringo Starr

“Can you see the sunset real good on the West side? You can see it on the East side too.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“All I ever wanted was a world without maps.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous.
But there is one thing about it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.”
― John Steinbeck, America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

“I like geography best, he said, because your mountains & rivers know the secret. Pay no attention to boundaries.”
― Brian Andreas, Story People

“I get to go to overseas places, like Canada.”
― Britney Spears

“The truth is, until you know any different, the island is enough.
Actually, I know different. And it's still enough.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Scorpio Races

“Everywhere's been where it is ever since it was first put there. It's called geography.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Geography is destiny.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Hadley realises that even though everything else is different, even though there's still an ocean between them, nothing really important has changed at all.

He's still her dad. The rest is just geography.”
― Jennifer E. Smith, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

“He who is ready to die for his country is a fool. For he didn’t choose where he was born; and where he was born didn’t choose him.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Dreams are our only geography—our native land.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“The decline of geography in academia is easy to understand: we live in an age of ever-increasing specialization, and geography is a generalist's discipline. Imagine the poor geographer trying to explain to someone at a campus cocktail party (or even to an unsympathetic adminitrator) exactly what it is he or she studies.
"Geography is Greek for 'writing about the earth.' We study the Earth."
"Right, like geologists."
"Well, yes, but we're interested in the whole world, not just the rocky bits. Geographers also study oceans, lakes, the water cycle..."
"So, it's like oceanography or hydrology."
"And the atmosphere."
"Meteorology, climatology..."
"It's broader than just physical geography. We're also interested in how humans relate to their planet."
"How is that different from ecology or environmental science?"
"Well, it encompasses them. Aspects of them. But we also study the social and economic and cultural and geopolitical sides of--"
"Sociology, economics, cultural studies, poli sci."
"Some geographers specialize in different world regions."
"Ah, right, we have Asian and African and Latin American studies programs here. But I didn't know they were part of the geography department."
"They're not."
(Long pause.)
"So, uh, what is it that do study then?”
― Ken Jennings

“- Com'è l'Africa? - gli chiedevano.
- Stanca.”
― Alessandro Baricco, Silk

“Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his early vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all the skills of the imagination. Language itself is a continuously imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Dogon, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impudent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, and that there's nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience.

This is not folklore, or quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans. The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed. That Dogon fox and his impudent dance came to live with us, but in a different body, and to serve a different mode of the imagination. We call him Brer Rabbit.”
― Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays

“Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“THE MIDDLE OF WHAT? EAST OF WHERE? THE REGION’S VERY name is based on a European view of the world, and it is a European view of the region that shaped it. The Europeans used ink to draw lines on maps: they were lines that did not exist in reality and created some of the most artificial borders the world has seen. An attempt is now being made to redraw them in blood.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“Bhutan does seem a bit unreal at times. Hardly anybody in the U.S. knows where it is. I have friends who still think the entire country is a figment of my imagination. When I was getting ready to move there, and I told people I was going to work in Bhutan, they'd inevitably ask, "Where's Butane?"

It is near Africa," I'd answer, to throw them off the trail. "It's where all the disposable lighters come from."

They'd nod in understanding.”
― Linda Leaming, Married to Bhutan

“Eratosthenes, the mapmaker who was the first man to accurately measure the size of the Earth, was a librarian.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“I love California; I practically grew up in Phoenix.”
― Dan Quayle

“Nothing kills creativity faster than a wall.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley

“India and Pakistan can agree on one thing: neither wants the other one around.”
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

“Periodista:
-¿Por qué vá a subir al Everest?
Mallory:
-Porque está ahí.”
― Conrad Anker, The Lost Explorer: Finding Mallory on Mt. Everest

“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A narrow-minded man can lead one to devalue others, and in the end, to desperately dangerous hates of outsiders, ranging in expression from discrimination against minorities to world conflagrations,' Tolman wrote. The solution? Create broader cognitive maps in the mind that encompass bigger geographical boundaries and a wider social scope, embracing those we might consider others, and in this way encourage empathy and understanding.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds