Being a nerd really pays off sometimes.

Eratosthenes, the mapmaker who was the first man to accurately measure the size of the Earth, was a librarian.

If I start outsourcing all my navigation to a little talking box in my car, I'm sort of screwed. I'm going to lose my car in the parking lot every single time.

I always bring my kids vacation souvenirs printed in Comic Sans, so they know I love them but not unconditionally.

There’s just something hypnotic about maps.

For me, it started as a child with one of those little wooden jigsaw maps of the U.S., wheres theres crocodiles on Florida and apples on Washington state. That was my very first map.

It's boring to have the same guy win. I'm actively rooting against myself.

You live overseas, you see these exotic places and you want to know about them. But, weirdly, it also made me homesick for all these very prosaic places in America.

The thing you like/are good at is a sacred thing.

We don't realize how hard it was to drive anywhere outside the major cities less than a century ago.

I always feel a certain sense of reverence in libraries, even small city ones that smell like homeless internet users.

...sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same...

The person who knows Christ best is the person who will pray best.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. It is not enough that a thing be possible for it to be believed.

Every government program needs to be more efficient. Instead of pointing out how other programs can tighten their belts, every program administrator must look inward to save money.

In the war, you lose areas, but you recapture another area. So, it is difficult to tell whether you are losing or gaining or it was a standstill. No-one has this answer.

Readers have actually changed the way I've done things, changed the course of my career even, about four or five times. Just from reader feedback.

The game taught me the game.

Perseverance is neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy; for it seems to be only the enduring of certain inclinations and opinions which men neither give themselves nor take away from themselves.

I'm a blowfish. I'm not a shark, I'm a blowfish.

We all ended up somewhere with our various uncertain lives flapping about us in tatters and our pockets full of foreign coins.