Heather

“Beyond it is the incalculable. In other words, numbers cannot exceed the number of things there are: so that for the teller and the audience of this tale, numbers still are attached to objects.”
― Robert Kaplan

“Let the pleasure of doodling led us to writing as decoration rather than to the peculiarly abstract sort of representation it inclines towards: the making of signs to look through rather than at.”
― Robert Kaplan, The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero

“Just as the rag doll wanted to be an eagle, the donkey a lion and the monkey a queen, the zero put on airs and pretended to be a digit.”
― Robert Kaplan

“Those wonderful coincidences of sound and sense between one language and another were also at work, giving each new term an alluring resonance.”
― Robert Kaplan