Quotes About Geography

America forms the longest and straightest bone in the earth's skeleton.

Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy, And the janitor's boy loves me; He's going to hunt for a desert isle In our geography.

Women are smart in business and dumb in love. They won't date outside their zip code, let alone outside the city. They are city snobs.

Hindu is a geographical identity, or at the most a cultural one - not a religion. There is no set of beliefs that everyone has to adhere to.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...

Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral. It doesn't have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative quantities, or throw its weight around in a brash and unseemly manner. It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn't need watching, and so we don't. But I will tell you this: the loss is entirely ours.

Look, if you draw a two thousand-mile-long line across the United States at any angle, it's going to pass through nine murder victims.

From that original colony sprang seven names that still feature on the landscape: Roanoke (which has the distinction of being the first Indian word borrowed by English settlers), Cape Fear, Cape Hatteras, the Chowan and Neuse Rivers, Chesapeake, and Virginia. (Previously, Virginia had been called Windgancon, meaning what gay clothes you wear - apparently what the locals had replied when an early reconnoitering party had asked the place's name.)

In 1606, a Spanish mariner named Luis Vaez de Torres sailed across the Pacific from South America and straight into the narrow channel (now called the Torres Strait) that separates Australia from New Guinea without having the faintest idea that he had just done the nautical equivalent of threading a needle.

Returning to my book, I learned that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country. It was a wonderful evening.

New Zealand, meanwhile, is part of the immense Indian Ocean plate even though it is nowhere near the Indian Ocean.

Kazakhstan, it turns out, was once attached to Norway and New England.

Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 percent of the Earth's history.

It's not even possible to say quite where the outback is. To Australians anything vaguely rural is "the bush." At some indeterminate point "the bush" becomes "the outback." Push on for another two thousand miles or so and eventually you come to bush again, and then a city, and then the sea. And that's Australia.

Then, having nothing better to do, I leafed through the index and amused myself, in a very low-key way, by looking for ridiculous names, of which Australia has a respectable plenitude. I am thus able to report that the following are all real places: Wee Waa, Poowong, Burrumbuttock, Suggan Buggan, Boomahnoomoonah, Waaia, Mullumbimby, Ewlyamartup, Jiggalong, and the supremely satisfying Tittybong.

Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent.

One-third of the landscape of the lower forty-eight states is covered in trees—728 million acres in all. Maine alone has 10 million uninhabited acres. That's 15,600 square miles, an area considerably bigger than Belgium, without a single permanent resident. Altogether, just 2 percent of the United States is classified as built up.

Thirty-six years later the Dutchman Abel Tasman was sent to look for the fabled South Land and managed to sail 2,000 miles along the underside of Australia without detecting that a substantial land mass lay just over the left-hand horizon.

They knew there was something there – possibly a biggish island like New Guinea, possibly a mass of smaller islands like the East Indies – and they called this amorphous entity New Holland, but none equated it with the long-sought southern continent.

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.

I might not be the first person in history to touch both ends of the Bryson Line, but I was certainly the first to do it and know he had done it. So

It would be possible to sail from Scandinavia to Canada without once crossing more than 250 miles of open sea.

Farming was independently invented at least seven times—in China, the Middle East, New Guinea, the Andes, the Amazon basin, Mexico, and West Africa.

Even with the advantage of clothing, shelter, and boundless ingenuity, humans can manage to live on only about 12 percent of Earth's land area and just 4 percent of the total surface area if you include the seas. It is a sobering thought that 96 percent of our planet is off-limits to us.