Robert Kaplan

“In autumn velvety shawls of maroon and sienna drape hillsides that fold down upon willow-braided streams.”

“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.”

“Will it be the idea of absence of any number-or the idea of a number for such absence? Is it to be the mark of the empty, or the empty mark?”

“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.”

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

“We realize that anything can be everything and each is also its opposite-then the image of zero's perfect ring shines before us.”

“For anything with a name(and zero had so many) surely existed......Yet how could what doesn't exist, exist?”

“True, they (numbers) are our invention and we have free will: but only to act compatibly with the world we've made.”

“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.”