Understood in a purely geometrical sense, it has length but no width at all. Fully linearized, the line is no longer the trace of a gesture but a chain of point-to-point connections. In these connections there is neither life nor movement. Linearization, in short, marks not the birth but the death of the line. In the next chapter we shall consider its ghostly spectre: the straight line of plane geometry.

Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History, London: Routledge, 2007. p. 151.

A followup – The Life of Lines – is forthcoming with Routledge in 2013.