Quotes About Topography

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, intently studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit, tracing the course of obscure rivers, checking elevations, consulting the marginal notes to see what a little circle with a flag on it signifies and what's the difference between a pictogram of an airplane with a circle around it and one without, issuing small profound hmmmms and nodding my head gravely without having the faintest idea why.

Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure.

If you are in the country, you should notice landmarks - that is, objects which help you to find your way or prevent you getting lost, such as distant hills, church towers, and nearer objects, such as peculiar buildings, trees, gates, rocks, etc.

Since much of the ocean floor remains unexplored (except perhaps for still-classified data acquired by the U.S. and Soviet navies), we may know more about the surface topography of Venus than about any other planet, Earth included.

Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.

There's just something hypnotic about maps.

I genuinely find it difficult to think of places that I'd never want to see again. It might be because part of my career has been concerned with writing about topography.

Geography is not egalitarian.

His eminence was due to the flatness of the surrounding landscape.

become common. The form of our times is regional, rather than city-centered. The landscape pattern created by work in our time is, interestingly, more like the old agrarian one: it has many centers like a painting by Kandinsky. "Region" is indeed an old word, going back to "kingdom," a time when boundaries were a bit vague, as defined by culture more than law, and, in many cases, topography, especially mountains

Taken together, the cordilleras and the altiplano make up the Andes, the second-biggest chain of mountains in the world.

After a time, though, Inman found that he had left the book and was simply forming the topography of home in his head. Cold Mountain, all its ridges and coves and watercourses. Pigeon River, Little East Fork, Sorrell Cove, Deep Gap, Fire Scald Ridge. He knew their names and said them to himself like the words of spells and incantations to ward off the things one fears most.

The earth's round, like an orange, but this map is like its skin, cut off in ovals, north to south, laid flat and stretched a bit at the top and bottom. A Dutchman called Mercator invented the way to do this accurately twenty years ago. It's the first accurate world map.

But first of all he is a woodsman, and you aren't a woodsman unless you have such a feeling for topography that you can look at the earth and see what it would look like without any woods or covering on it. It's something like the gift all men wish for when they or young-- or old-- of being able to look through a woman's clothes and see her body, possibly even a little of her character.

and to compile accurate charts of the coastlines.

Schöner's globe depicted a strait cutting through the American continent in the approximate location

My first occupation was to map the country.

Whenever I think of these writers together, I am reminded that what gives a city its special character is not just its topography or its buildings but rather the sum total of every chance encounter, every memory, letter, color, and image jostling in its inhabitants' crowded memories after they have been living, like me, on the same streets for fifty years.

I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.

A list of the thirteen types of photograph (plus an afterthought): Aide-memoire Reportage Work of art Topography Erotica/Pornography Advertisement Abstract image Literature Text Autobiography Compositional Functional illustration Snapshot

Behind the smokehouse that summer, Ringo and I had a living map. Although Vicksburg was just a handful of chips from the woodpile and the River a trench scraped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe, it (river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even in miniature that ponderable though massive recalcitrance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of the moment.

Topographically the country is magnificent -- and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak.

If we strike a line to the N.W. from Sydney to Wellington Valley, we shall find that little change takes place in the geological features of the country.

We are leading as thorough a study of 'alienation's positive pole' as of its negative pole. As a consequence of our diagnosis of the poverty of wealth, we are able to establish the world map of the extreme wealth of poverty. These speaking maps of a new topography will be in fact the first realization of 'human geography.' On them we will replace oil-deposits with the contours of layers of untapped pedestrian consciousness.