“A map is just a piece of paper that lies about where the mud is. You can draw a straight line from here to the horizon, but God didn't pave it, and He certainly didn't cosign the loan.”Samuel Walker · Peter James Stouffer
This is the first thing Samuel says in the book, not to another character, but to the reader, before any scene has opened and before any argument has been named.
He spent fifty years reading land with a transit level and a chain. He knew what maps left out because he had been to the places they drew as clean lines. The sentence lands because it is not ornamental skepticism. It is field knowledge.
It establishes the register at once: aphoristic, skeptical of abstraction, and grounded in the physical world underfoot.