“
If we are not apt to steer our life and engineer our individuality, we become preys of the pecking order or panting cardboard characters turning into walking dead. ("Terra incognita" )
”
”
Erik Pevernagie
“
Women emerging like aliens in a hesitant future, in a men’s world with impervious codes, may feel like dots in an uncharted territory. Discovering the crucial points, which don't line up with the unbearability of reality, may be a key to the right compass in life. ( "Terra incognita")
”
”
Erik Pevernagie
“
One of the many difficult things about women was that they tended to pick the most unsuitable times to tell you something they considered to be important, and then became irrationally upset when you failed to remember it.
”
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Ruth Downie (Terra Incognita (Gaius Petreius Ruso, #2))
“
Eva knows I'm terra incognita and explores me unhurriedly, like you did. Because she's lean as a boy. Because her scent is almonds, meadow grass. Because if I smile at her ambition to be an Egyptologist, she kicks my shin under the table. Because she makes me think about something other than myself. Because even when serious she shines. Because she prefers travelogues to Sir Walter Scott, prefers Billy Mayerl to Mozart, and couldn't tell a C major from a sergeant major. Because I, only I, see her smile a fraction before it reaches her face. Because Emperor Robert is not a good man - his best part is commandeered by his unperformed music - but she gives me that rarest smile, anyway. Because we listened to nightjars. Because her laughter spurts through a blowhole in the top of her head and sprays all over the morning. Because a man like me has no business with this substance "beauty," yet here she is, in these soundproof chambers of my heart.
”
”
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
“
Back from where? you're not going out again and leaving me here are you?? Holy Hercules I sound like somebody's wife
”
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Ruth Downie (Terra Incognita (Gaius Petreius Ruso, #2))
“
In coming to Alaska, McCandless yearned to wander uncharted country, to find a blank spot on the map. In 1992, however, there were no more blank spots on the map—-not in Alaska, not anywhere. But Chris, with his idiosyncratic logic, came up with an elegant solution to this dilemma: He simply got rid of the map. In his own mind, if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita.
”
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Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)
“
I find myself wondering how many other memories are hidden from me in the recesses of my own brain; indeed my own brain will seem to be the last great terra incognita, and I will be filled with wonder at the prospect of some day discovering new worlds there. Imagine the lost continent of Atlantis and all the submerged islands of childhood right there waiting to be found. The inner space we have never adequately explored. The worlds within worlds within worlds. And the marvelous thing is that they are waiting for us. If we fail to discover them, it is only because we haven't yet built the right vehicle - spaceship or submarine or poem - which will take us to them.
It's for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write? My writing is the submarine or spaceship which takes me to the unknown worlds within my head. And the adventure is endless and inexhaustible. If I learn to build the right vehicle, then I can discover even more territories. And each new poem is a new vehicle, designed to delve a little deeper (or fly a little higher) than the one before.
”
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Erica Jong (Fear of Flying)
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I believed that what mattered to God was the direction I was facing not how far away I was. Sin it seemed to me was the refusal to let God be God.
”
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Sara Wheeler (Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica)
“
The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita—unknown territory.
”
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Daniel J. Boorstin (The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself)
“
I seem to remember sitting on a golden bench, and she started chattering about the sunset, or something. She seemed quite happy so I let her get on with it. Then she got hold of my hand and asked me what I was thinking about. So I said, "The treatment of anal fistulae".
”
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Ruth Downie (Terra Incognita (Gaius Petreius Ruso, #2))
“
What color is time? Where do the thoughts of the dead go? How is it diseases spread but miracles don't? Have you ever thought of that?
”
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Ruth Downie (Terra Incognita (Gaius Petreius Ruso, #2))
“
A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.
”
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Vladimir Nabokov (Pnin)
“
Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward—pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.
Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.
It flung them like stones.
These unhappy agents found that what had already been found in abundance on Earth—a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.
Only inwardness remained to be explored.
Only the human soul remain terra incognita.
This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (The Sirens of Titan)
“
we all carry around this great unexplored ‘elephant graveyard’ inside us. Outer space aside, this is truly humanity’s last terra incognita.
”
”
Haruki Murakami (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World)
“
A boy is content to be made into a civil man by caning, or any one of a number of other stratagems, but a girl, being disqualified by Nature, as it were, from such physical brutality, must remain forever something of a terra incognita. Don’t you think?
”
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Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1))
“
Without them, our dreams may remain terra incognita. I know mine did. Using them, the light of insight is coupled with the power for expansive
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Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
“
Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner’s every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
“
But she’s only a woman!” The watch captain shook his head again. “So was Helen of Troy, sir. Look what she started.
”
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Ruth Downie (Terra Incognita (Gaius Petreius Ruso, #2))
“
Ono što je u početku bilo hladno i mračno, sad je postalo svijetlo i toplo, kao prošlost ili zavičaj. Zapravo, tu smo izgleda, bolje nego na drugim mjestima, shvatili da nam je prošlost zavičaj. I ne samo zavičaj, nego i domovina. Druge nismo imali. Sve oko nas već godinama je terra incognita nastanjena čudnim plemenima. Tridesetogodišnjacima koji vjeruju u meditaciju i uroke, etičkim vegetarijancima koji kao zaposlenici banaka tjeraju obitelji iz stanova i prodaju ih na dražbi, agresivnim pacifistima, onima koji više vole razgovarati sa strojevima nego s ljudima, onima koji stvarnost vide kroz ekran, onima koji se ne sjećaju vremena prije kompjutera, moralistima koji zaziru od golotinje i psovke toliko desetljeća poslije prvog nudizma, lažnim plemstvom, lažnim dobrotvorima, lažnim vjernicima...
”
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Zoran Ferić (Kalendar Maja)
“
The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery. Thoreau: ‘Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations…’ Lose the whole world, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
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British rain was rarely that simple. For days on end, instead of falling, it simply hung around in the air like a wife waiting for you to notice she was sulking.
”
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Ruth Downie (Terra Incognita (Gaius Petreius Ruso, #2))
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Getting angry with her cousin, she reminded herself, was like getting angry with a sheep for being stupid. It ruined your day and the sheep was too dim to care.
”
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Ruth Downie (Terra Incognita (Gaius Petreius Ruso, #2))
“
The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
“
But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment’s consideration will teach that, however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
”
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
“
Tisn't any need for you't'know. Even without you knowin', you function as yourself. That's your black box. In other words, we all carry around this great unexplored 'elephant graveyard' inside us. Outer space aside, this is truly humanity's last terra incognita
”
”
Haruki Murakami (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World)
“
The thought processes of a man who'd relax with his shoes off, his coat on, were foreign territory to Lech.Then again, the thought processes of Jackson Lamb, as revealed by their subsequent conversation, were probaby terra incognita to the psychiatric profession as a whole.
”
”
Mick Herron (Joe Country (Slough House, #6))
“
...with Cervantes and his contemporaries, it inquires into the nature of adventure; with Richardson, it begins to examine 'what happens inside' to unmask the secret life of the feelings; with Balzac, it discovers man's rootedness in history; with Flaubert, it explores the terra previously incognita of the everyday; with Tolstoy, it focuses on the intrusion of the irrational in human behavior and decisions. It probes time: the elusive past with Proust, the elusive present with Joyce. With Thomas Mann, it examines the role of the myths from the remote past that control our present actions...
”
”
Milan Kundera (The Art of the Novel)
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Thousands of years of waiting, and we're finally free. When the history books include this part, I don't want there to be a p-paragraph saying that monsters still had to stay in the Underground because Dr. Alphys was hung over.”
“okay, that sounds bad, but consider this; everyone would remember your name when it came up on a quiz.
”
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TimeCloneMike (Terra Incognita (We're Not Weird, We're Eccentric, #2))
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I must warn you at the outset that I'm not at my best conversing with little girls," he announced.
I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut.
"A boy is content to be made into a civil man by caning, or any one of a number of other stratagems, but a girl, being disqualified by Nature, as it were, from such physical brutality, must remain forever something of a terra incognita. Don't you think?
”
”
Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1))
“
Sixsmith,
Eva. Because her name is a synonym for temptation: what treads nearer to the core of man? Because her soul swims in her eyes. Because I dream of creeping through the velvet folds to her room, where I let myself in, hum her a tune so-so-so softly, she stands with her naked feet on mine, her ear to my heart, and we waltz like string puppets. After that kiss, she says, “Vous embrassez comme un poisson rouge!” and in moonlight mirrors we fall in love with our youth and beauty. Because all my life, sophisticated, idiotic women have taken it upon themselves to understand me, to cure me, but Eva knows I’m terra incognita and explores me unhurriedly, like you did. Because she’s lean as a boy. Because her scent is almonds, meadow grass. Because if I smile at her ambition to be an Egyptologist, she kicks my shin under the table. Because she makes me think about something other than myself. Because even when serious she shines. Because she prefers travelogues to Sir Walter Scott, prefers Billy Mayerl to Mozart, and couldn’t tell C major from a sergeant major. Because I, only I, see her smile a fraction before it reaches her face. Because Emperor Robert is not a good man—his best part is commandeered by his unperformed music—but she gives me that rarest smile, anyway. Because we listened to nightjars. Because her laughter spurts through a blowhole in the top of her head and sprays all over the morning. Because a man like me has no business with this substance “beauty,” yet here she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart.
Sincerely, R.F.
”
”
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
“
Friendship is a crucible of positive and negative feelings that are in a permanent state of ebullition. There’s an expression: with friends God is watching me, with enemies I watch myself. In the end, an enemy is the fruit of an oversimplification of human complexity: the inimical relationship is always clear, I know that I have to protect myself, I have to attack. On the other hand, God only knows what goes on in the mind of a friend. Absolute trust and strong affections harbor rancor, trickery, and betrayal. Perhaps that’s why, over time, male friendship has developed a rigorous code of conduct. The pious respect for its internal laws and the serious consequences that come from violating them have a long tradition in fiction. Our friendships, on the other hand, are a terra incognita, chiefly to ourselves, a land without fixed rules. Anything and everything can happen to you, nothing is certain. Its exploration in fiction advances arduously, it is a gamble, a strenuous undertaking. And at every step there is above all the risk that a story’s honesty will be clouded by good intentions, hypocritical calculations, or ideologies that exalt sisterhood in ways that are often nauseating.
”
”
Elena Ferrante
“
Cultural criticism always attacks the mass media. I don't think that makes sense. We should look more closely at the work of deformation that starts deeper down, especially because it involves so much demoralization. Something gets destroyed there that should not be destroyed under any circumstances - THE AWARENESS THAT KNOWLEDGE IS BORN OUT OF EUPHORIA AND THAT INTELLIGENCE IS A RELATIONSHIP OF THE HAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS WITH ITSELF. And that intelligence partly consists in the ability to find our own ways of overcoming the boredom that develops in an under-used brain. Across society as a whole, the most disturbing symptom is that people are no longer ambitious enough to plumb the limits of understanding within themselves. INTELLIGENCE IS THE LAST UTOPIAN POTENTIAL. THE ONLY TERRA INCOGNITA HUMANKIND STILL OWNS ARE THE GALAXIES OF THE BRAIN, THE MILKY WAYS OF INTELLIGENCE. And there is hardly any any convincing space travel in them. Incidentally, this internal astronautics is the only alternative to a consumerist perspective. It is the only thing that could explain to people in the future that their intelligence space is so immense that they can experiment with themselves for millennia without becoming exhausted. The really good news is that there is something breathtakingly great that is called intelligence and is uncharted. ARE YOU WILLING TO VOLUNTEER ?
”
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Peter Sloterdijk (Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews 1993 - 2012)
“
What had happened was this: I fell out of my own map. It's an easy thing to do, especially in middle age, but really it can happen at any time. We all live by different lights - success, for some, desire for others - and take our bearings along different dreams. Some of us fly west with the night, into the unknown, urged on by adventure; others look only for the harbor lights, and stay safely in sight of home. But whichever way we choose, we come to rely on the sameness of our days, on the fact that for years at a time the road ahead looks much like the road behind, the horizon clear, the obstacles negotiable. And yet from time to time we stumble into wilderness. It can happen to anyone, at any age: the graduate putting away the cap and gown, the fifty-five-year-old rereading the layoff notice, the wife staring at the empty side of the still-warm bed. Now what? they whisper as they look ahead to a place where the landmarks disappear, and the map reads TERRA INCOGNITA.
”
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Lynn Darling (Out of the Woods: A Memoir of Wayfinding)
“
To counter our intense cultural conditioning, we must possess a sense of curious engagement to venture into the unconscious. Even though it's a part of us, it exists as terra incognita or, perhaps more appropriately, psyche incognita—we simply have drawn a sketchy map of the psyche and marked a large segment in frightful red letters, “Mind Unknown.” We will never develop a truer conceptualization of the subconscious and unconscious if we only dance around it or consider it from the safe distance of the waking world.
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Robert Waggoner (The Lucid Dreaming Pack: Gateway to the Inner Self)
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Three years with Claudia had taught Ruso that when a woman said something did not matter and refused to tell you what it was, it usually mattered a great deal—to her, if not to you. Frequently her way of punishing you for not knowing what it was in the first place was to refuse to tell you until you gave up asking. This was her cue to accuse you of not caring about her, otherwise you would have known what she wanted you to know without having to be told. Finally, if you were lucky, she would explain the latest way in which you had failed her expectations. If you were not lucky, she would explain...
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Ruth Downie (Terra Incognita (Gaius Petreius Ruso, #2))
“
As I grew into boyhood, I extended the range of my observations. My holiday afternoons were spent in rambles about the surrounding country. I made myself familiar with all its places famous in history or fable. I knew every spot where a murder or robbery had been committed, or a ghost seen. I visited the neighboring villages, and added greatly to my stock of knowledge, by noting their habits and customs, and conversing with their sages and great men. I even journeyed one long summer's day to the summit of the most distant hill, whence I stretched my eye over many a mile of terra incognita, and was astonished to find how vast a globe I inhabited.
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Washington Irving (The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon)
“
My reading has been lamentably desultory and immedthodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia, whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions, nor can form the remotest, conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first named of these two Terrae Incognitae. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear or Charles' Wain, the place of any star, or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness - and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the west, I verily believe, that, while all the world were grasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study, but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies, and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great pains taking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely unacquainted with the modern languages, and, like a better man than myself, have 'small Latin and less Greek'. I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers - not from the circumstance of my being town-born - for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it, 'on Devon's leafy shores' - and am no less at a loss among purely town objects, tool, engines, mechanic processes. Not that I affect ignorance - but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious, and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a tete-a-tete there is no shuffling. The truth will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the being left alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed man that does not know me.
”
”
Charles Lamb
“
To speak conventionally - and I think it is easier for the general reader to see Zen thus presented - there are unknown recesses in our minds which lie beyond the threshold of the relatively constructed consciousness. To designate them as “sub-conciousness” or “supra-consciousness” is not correct. The word “beyond” is used simply because it is a most convenient term to indicate their whereabouts. But as a matter of fact there is no “beyond”, no “underneath”, no “upon” in our consciousness. The mind is one indivisible whole and cannot be torn in pieces. The so-called terra incognita is the concession of Zen to our ordinary way of talking, because whatever field of consciousness that is known to us is generally filled with conceptual riffraff, and to get rid of them, which is absolutely necessary for maturing Zen experience, the Zen psychologist sometimes points to the presence of some inaccessible region in our minds. Though in actuality there is no such region apart from our everyday consciousness, we talk of it as generally more easily comprehensible by us.
”
”
D.T. Suzuki (An Introduction to Zen Buddhism)
“
Who is America named after? Not the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, but Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol merchant. Ameryk was the chief investor in the second transatlantic voyage of John Cabot—the English name of the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 laid the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. He moved to London from Genoa in 1484 and was authorized by King Henry VII to search for unknown lands to the west. On his little ship Matthew, Cabot reached Labrador in May 1497 and became the first recorded European to set foot on American soil, predating Vespucci by two years. Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him. There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year: “…on Saint John the Baptist’s day [June 24], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the Mathew,” which clearly suggests this is what happened. Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents. This is the first use of the term America to refer to the new continent. The earliest surviving map to use the name is Martin Waldseemüller’s great map of the world of 1507, but it only applied to South America. In his notes Waldseemüller makes the assumption that the name is derived from a Latin version of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, because Vespucci had discovered and mapped the South American coast from 1500 to 1502. This suggests he didn’t know for sure and was trying to account for a name he had seen on other maps, possibly Cabot’s. The only place where the name “America” was known and used was Bristol—not somewhere the France-based Waldseemüller was likely to visit. Significantly, he replaced “America” with “Terra Incognita” in his world map of 1513. Vespucci never reached North America. All the early maps and trade were British. Nor did he ever use the name of America for his discovery. There’s a good reason for this. New countries or continents were never named after a person’s first name, but always after the second (as in Tasmania, Van Diemen’s Land, or the Cook Islands). America would have become Vespucci Land (or Vespuccia) if the Italian explorer had consciously given his name to it.
”
”
John Lloyd (The Book of General Ignorance)
“
Sexual reproduction is thus a costly investment that has to pay for itself in the short run. The details of theory and experiment on this topic are fascinating (see, e.g., Maynard Smith, 1978; Ridley, 1993), but for our purposes a few highlights from the currently front-running theory are most instructive: sex (in vertebrates like us, at least) pays for itself by making our offspring relatively inscrutable to the parasites we endow them with from birth. Parasites have short lifespans compared with their hosts, and typically reproduce many times during their host’s lifetime. Mammals, for instance, are hosts to trillions of parasites. (Yes, right now, no matter how healthy and clean you are, there are trillions of parasites of thousands of different species inhabiting your gut, your blood, your skin, your hair, your mouth, and every other part of your body. They have been rapidly evolving to survive against the onslaught of your defenses since the day you were born.) Before a female can mature to reproductive age, her parasites evolve to fit her better than any glove. (Meanwhile, her immune system evolves to combat them, a standoff—if she is healthy—in an ongoing arms race.) If she gave birth to a clone, her parasites would leap to it and find themselves at home from the outset. They would be already optimized to their new surroundings. If instead she uses sexual reproduction to endow her offspring with a mixed set of genes (half from her mate), many of these genes—or, more directly, their products, in the offspring’s internal defenses—will be alien or cryptic to the ship-jumping parasites. Instead of home sweet home, the parasites will find themselves in terra incognita. This gives the offspring a big head start in the arms race.
”
”
Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon)
“
They work with feverish haste, even though the country road they’re on is silent except for birdsong. They take their cue from Parks, who is grim-faced and urgent, speaking in monosyllables, chivvying them along. “Okay,” he says at last. “We’re good to go. Everybody ready to move out?” One by one they nod. It’s starting to sink in that a journey you could do in half a day on good roads has just become a four- or five-day trek through terra completely incognita, and Justineau presumes that that’s as hard for the rest of them to come to terms with as it is for her. She was brought to the base by helicopter, directly from Beacon–and she lived in Beacon for long enough that it became her status quo. Thoughts from before that time, from the Breakdown, when the world filled with monsters who looked like people you knew and loved, and every living soul went scrambling and skittering for cover like mice when the cat wakes up, have been so deeply suppressed, for so long, that they’re not memories at all–they’re memories of memories. And
”
”
M.R. Carey (The Girl With All the Gifts)
“
On the Larch Scape humans had never managed to extend a sizeable population across entire continents, so much of the megafauna considered to be a distant Pleistocene memory on other Scapes had lingered. The mammoths, giant sloths and woolly rhinoceroses were extinct, but there were hyenas, fanged cats and amphicyonids hunting bison, omnivorous deer, glyptodons, great boars, and wild horses too large for men to ride south of the Laurentian Sea, in what was called Illinois on Malone’s Scape. The island of Manhattan was not an island due to the lower sea level, and it was uninhabited by men, an impenetrable mass of old growth larch trees ruled by creatures thought to be related to the raccoon. The Larch ‘raccoon’ was frequently said to be too intelligent to domesticate; in groups they would destroy shelters and eat the faces of sleeping humans. The atrox cat had been genetically sequenced in cooperation with Austral scientists years ago and determined to be more closely related to the lion than the cougar, and it had enjoyed a range extending north of the Laurentian Sea up to the glaciers until very recently. It was a dark creature with a thick mane in both genders; besides the elements, their prides were the deadliest things to encounter in the far north.
”
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Mark Ferguson (Terra Incognita)
“
I'm making art.
Terra
”
”
Justina Chen Headley
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Snakes are the most widely dreamed about, most feared, most religiously significant creature in the world. A squiggle, they are believed to be the first animal ever drawn. As sea serpents they embodied terra incognita on ancient maps; they marked a “Don’t Tread on Me” barrier between the colonies and the rest of the world; they are the physical line between the Judeo-Christian notions of good and evil. No other creature figures so widely in folklore and myth. No other creature is so universally accused of hijacking the amygdala, the region of the brain responsible for flight. According to a recent hypothesis published in the Journal of Human Evolution, the shape of the human head—eyes front, large brain—stems from a desire by man’s ancestors to avoid snake predators.
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Bryan Christy (The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers)
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We are our own terra incognita, the country on maps where dragons lurk.
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Margot Livesey
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The Baltimore where I reeled around drunkenly for years, and got hassled by the cops exactly once—for impersonating a deity—was White Baltimore, which, if mapped, would look like a tenuous network of interconnected nodes laid over the terra incognita where the majority of the city’s inhabitants lived their lives. That other Baltimore, hungry and disenfranchised and heavily armed, written off by politicians, pushed around by the cops and called animals on the Internet, was always a block away.
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Tim Kreider
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how small a strip has as yet been explored of the vast continent of Sanskrit literature, and how much still remains terra incognita.
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F. Max Müller (India: What Can it Teach Us? A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University of Cambridge)
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Do you have to do that?"
"Do what?"
"Talk with your mouth open."
"That's how talking works dumbass."
"I meant chew with your mouth open. This is a Chinese joint not a seafood joint."
"Yeah, well, you snore and you show no signs of stopping. So I guess neither of us is getting what we want today."
"Jesus Christ, will you two get a room already? The sexual tension is thicker than the sweet and sour sauce."
Both agents turned to see a man carrying several takeout boxes from the cash register to the door, shoving it open with one shoulder and holding it as some sort of aquatic or amphibious monster in a business suit made its way inside.
Agent Black turned to his partner.
"Wasn't that the conspiracy theorist guy?"
Agent Brown raised both eyebrows.
"That was what you thought was most important there? Not the whole sexual tension comment?
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TimeCloneMike (Terra Incognita (We're Not Weird, We're Eccentric, #2))
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Joe blinked, turned his head and tried to focus on the table. There was a card that said 'Happy Birthday' except that the word Birthday had been crossed out and the phrase 'Badass Cyborg Arm Surgery' had been hastily written beneath it in what appeared to be black marker.
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TimeCloneMike (Terra Incognita (We're Not Weird, We're Eccentric, #2))
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Thanks to these names, the terrae incognitae are gradually claimed; teetering on the border of civilization the unknown lands soon become islands. It is here that the land spirits find refuge and where they continue to dwell. The places that escape human control are quite stereotypical and essentially correspond to lands that are difficult to live in and to cultivate. This therefore causes a new natural distribution of spirits and places based on the inaccessibility of these spaces. So it is perfectly normal that the loca incerta, the dangerous places, would be forests, moors, mountains, as well as marshes and—as we shall see—bodies of water in general.
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Claude Lecouteux (Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices)
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Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward--pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.
Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.
It flung them like stones.
These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth--a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attraction.
Only inwardness remained to be explored.
Only the human soul remained 'terra incognita
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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The idea of the Bible as a divine guidebook, a map for getting through the terra incognita of life, is our golden calf. It's a substitute for the wilderness wandering that the life of faith necessarily entails.
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Timothy Beal (The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book)
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In the sagas of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle, the scholar-adventurer burned his candle to a nub as he pored over quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. A map drawn in faded ink, a cryptic document in Latin fell into his fingers. From such glimmerings, a glorious excursion into terra incognita unfurled, as the scholar’s team wound through an Icelandic volcano down to the center of the earth or traversed a lost Venezuelan plateau teeming with dinosaurs. As
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David Roberts (In Search of the Old Ones (A Brief History of the Anasazi))
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hung around in the air like a wife waiting for you to notice she was sulking.
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Ruth Downie (Terra Incognita (Gaius Petreius Ruso, #2))
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Perhaps it is Cervantes whom the two phenomenologists neglected to take into consideration in their judgment of the Modern Era. By that I mean: If it is true that philosophy and science have forgotten about man's being, it emerges all the more plainly that with Cervantes a great European art took shape that is nothing other than the investigation of this forgotten being.
Indeed, all the great existential themes Heidegger analyzes in "Being and Time""— considering them to have been neglected by all earlier European philosophy — had been unveiled, displayed, illuminated by four centuries of the novel (four centuries of European reincarnation of the novel). In its own way, through its own logic, the novel discovered the various dimensions of existence one by one: with Cervantes and his contemporaries, it inquires into the nature of adventure; with Richardson, it begins to examine "what happens inside," to unmask the secret life of the feelings; with Balzac, it discovers man's rootedness in history; with Flaubert, it explores the terra previously incognita of the everyday; with Tolstoy, it focuses on the intrusion of the irrational in human behavior and decisions. It probes time: the elusive past with Proust, the elusive present with Joyce. With Thomas Mann, it examines the role of the myths from the remote past that control our present actions. Et cetera, et cetera.
The novel has accompanied man uninterruptedly and faithfully since the beginning of the Modern Era. It was then that the "passion to know," which Husserl considered the essence of European spirituality, seized the novel and led it to scrutinize man's concrete life and protect it against "the forgetting of being"; to hold "the world of life" under a permanent light. That is the sense in which I understand and share Hermann Broch's insistence in repeating: The sole raison d'etre of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto
unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
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Milan Kundera (The Art of the Novel)
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11:23 AM LadyDeathwish: Hey that skeleton in the video with you and the cop
11:23 AM LadyDeathwish: Is he single
11:23 AM: r u talking abt papyrus or sans
11:24 AM: papyrus is the tall
11:24 AM: WAIT WAT
11:24 AM LadyDeathwish: DON'T YOU START
11:24 AM LadyDeathwish: Being demi is a chore
11:24 AM LadyDeathwish: Who am I attracted to? and why?!
11:24 AM: fuck I know Matt was an asshole
11:24 AM: but I didn't realize he was bad enough to get you to give up on human men entirely
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TimeCloneMike (Terra Incognita (We're Not Weird, We're Eccentric, #2))
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To the immense majority of men, even in civilized countries, speculative philosophy has ever been, and must ever remain, a terra incognita. Yet it is not the less true, that all the epoch-forming Revolutions of the Christian world, the revolutions of religion and with them the civil, social, and domestic habits of the nations concerned, have coincided with the rise and fall of metaphysical systems. So few are the minds that really govern the machine of society, and so incomparably more numerous and more important are the indirect consequences of things than their foreseen and direct effects.
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Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot)
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It's complicated." Chara turned around to face forward again. "I realized when you were trying to get me to come with you. A lot of people went to a lot of trouble to make sure I got a second chance. If I die fighting Jordan, I probably won't get a third. And if I did manage to kill him, that's another mess for Frisk and Papyrus and mom and dad to clean up. And then when he was talking, I understood. Sometimes the universe does let you have a second chance. But my second chance is not his.
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TimeCloneMike (Terra Incognita (We're Not Weird, We're Eccentric, #2))
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It took a moment longer for them to consider that they were being chased by a man on magical ice skates, only the ice was on his feet and not the surface being skated on.
"...fine. Why not."
"What's happening?! We're slowing down!"
"Well. It appears. We have a new tradition in Ebott's Wake. Cultists On Ice!
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TimeCloneMike (Terra Incognita (We're Not Weird, We're Eccentric, #2))
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Chara? What about you?"
"...I want to get off Mister Bones' Wild Ride.
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TimeCloneMike (Terra Incognita (We're Not Weird, We're Eccentric, #2))
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The Latin language is no longer read widely, and so we have lost sight of the old distinction between the real Terra Australis or Australia on the one hand, and the unknown continent called Terra Australis Incognita on the other. That distinction, however, was real to scientists and geographers living in the eighteenth century. They knew of one southern continent, now known as Australia, but then called New Holland by the Dutch and even by the English. But somewhere, out in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, lay another and richer continent, which, they believed, was waiting to be found.
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Geoffrey Blainey (Captain Cook’s Epic Voyage)
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There were people with chronic pain, in need of a miracle and receiving only medicine and advice they had probably heard a hundred times before. There were hideous stinking ulcers to clean and dress and lectures to be given to their weary owners about hygiene and exercise and diet. There were people whose descriptions of their symptoms made no sense at all even though he understood all the words. Ingenuous was unable to explain what “He has feathers in his chest” meant, and “My knees are runny”.
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Ruth Downie (Terra Incognita (Gaius Petreius Ruso, #2))
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I’m sorry, Ruso. I know you mean well. But you’re so determined to do the right thing.” “What’s the matter with that?” “You don’t understand what the right thing is - which makes you dangerous.
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Ruth Downie (Terra Incognita (Gaius Petreius Ruso, #2))
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Les Congolais ont reçu de Léopold II une terre impressionnante qui était auparavant terra incognita.
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Jean-Pierre Nzeza Kabu Zex-Kongo (Léopold II Le plus grand chef d'Etat de l'histoire du Congo (Études africaines) (French Edition))
Julia Cameron (El camino del artista)
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When Mendaña’s ships finally sailed away, the Marquesas were lost again to the European world for nearly two hundred years. They had been none too securely plotted to begin with, and their location was further suppressed by the Spanish in order to forestall competition in the search for Terra Australis Incognita.
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Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
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Terra Australis Incognita was one of the great follies of European geography, an idea that made sense in the abstract but for which there was never any actual proof. It was based on a bit of Ptolemaic logic handed down from the ancient Greeks, which held that there must be an equal weight of continental matter in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, or else the world would topple over and, as the great mapmaker Gerardus Mercator envisioned it, “fall to destruction among the stars.
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Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
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Terra incognita (Άγνωστης γης)
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Umberto Eco (Το όνομα του ρόδου: Τόμος 1)
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beyond the confluence lies the wilderness of the Needles country, known to only a few cowboys and uranium prospectors; on the west side of the junction is another labyrinth of canyons, pinnacles and fins of naked stone, known to even fewer, closer than anything else in the forty-eight United States to being genuine terra incognita—The Maze.
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Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)
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Nemed was a smart kid, but like almost all kids he operated under the delusion that adults were genuinely as knowledgeable and certain as they pretended to be in front of kids.
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Mark Ferguson (Terra Incognita)
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For a moment of nearly five seconds Nemed had wanted to correct, to interject with the boasting recitation of a child who has just learned something interesting about the subject at hand and wants to amaze the adults; he had wanted to tell Emer that the Inrisus were not magical or truly evil, and that their medicine was amazing. The tablet suggested that the Inrisus were entirely made of tumor cells; long ago, blue historians believed, the Inrisus had conquered cancer and found a way to separate its resilience to radiation and chemical attack from its malignancy, producing cells both immortal and functional. Their brains and hearts and other parts would keep showing up on medical scans, like blotches in a smoker’s lungs. Carcinogens simply made an Inrisus pregnant.
But then Nemed realized that Emer was wearing beaver hide, that no part of his costume even had a zipper; he might not even know what cancer was. He wouldn’t know that it could be treated with radiation or chemicals; he wouldn’t appreciate the Inrisus and their ability to turn cancer into eternal life. He would probably call it necromancy, or a form of vampirism, stealing the life of an unborn infant because that was supposed to be the only way to live forever in the old stories of the Folk.
I think less of him, Nemed realized. Him, and the others.
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Mark Ferguson (Terra Incognita)
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The problem was time. Her augmented physiology had given her the time to go from hardened bigot to tolerant, relaxed progressive, reserving fear and hatred for the truer Enemy. She even had time to regress back. Alder Malone probably wasn’t going to have the time.
"He changed clothes in front of me … like I was some pet, some dog. Privacy is between humans.
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Mark Ferguson (Terra Incognita)
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In all bluefolk the immune system is quite advanced. A large number of relevant genes seem to be imported from the crocodile: those creatures live in stagnant, muddy water in much warmer climates, where they are exposed to many diseases and parasites. Wrestling with prey or each other, they may be wounded, but the dirty swamp water in the cut is mostly harmless. It was a very important acquisition by the Auravelus; it meant that virtually none of the old bioweapons were effective against them. More ordinary bluefolk could still suffer under a few recipes, but often no more than a rash. Chemical weapons had to be used instead. Infection or contamination through wounds was largely useless; our Asian friends determined that inhalation was a more viable route. Concoctions made against the lungs, as aerosols, were the most successful
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Mark Ferguson (Terra Incognita)
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Scandinavia, though, really is terra incognita. The Romans didn’t bother with it. Charlemagne couldn’t care less.
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Michael Booth (The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia)
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What was the worst he could do?
Make me feel dumb? Inadequate?
Dad had done his damnedest to do that, to steer me to Terra Nullis, that godforsaken empty land where one might survive but never flourish. To keep me in Terra Incognita and remain a girl as undiscovered as Unknown Land itself.
He had failed.
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Justina Chen
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As we gain - or regain - our creative identity, we lose the false self we are sustaining. The loss of this false self can feel traumatic: "I don't know who I am anymore. I don't recognize me." Remember that the more you feel yourself to be terra incognita, the more certain you can be that the recovery process is working.
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Julia Cameron
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He never grasped that the bay in which he had been attacked (now known as Golden Bay) lay at the opening of the large strait that separates the North and South Islands of New Zealand, or that the “continent” he had discovered was in fact two large islands. Thinking that he might have chanced upon some corner of Terra Australis Incognita, he named it Staten Landt and proposed that it might be connected to the Staten Landt named in 1616 by Schouten and Le Maire. This, however, was unlikely, as Schouten and Le Maire’s Staten Landt was an island off the tip of South America, more than five thousand watery miles away.
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Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)