Marshall McLuhan on Writing

"Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark."

"Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression."

"Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made “bad grammar” possible."

"All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation."

"There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening."

"Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity."

"At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant."

"The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility."

"History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order."

"Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama."

"All words, in every language, are metaphors."

"Language is a form of organized stutter."

"Language is a sense, like touch."

"The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age."

"If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures...and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and “closure” of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible."