The Story of Stories Quotes

“Writing's immutability reminds us that, just as a painting of a pipe is not in fact a pipe, so writing is not in fact language. It is important to know the difference between a sound and its echo. Writing is an illusion of language, language's shadow, not a rabbit but merely a cloud that looks like one; at most, a record of language, rendered imperfectly and approximately in a wholly different form. Writing is to language as maps are to streets.”
― Kevin Ashton, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art