>"The world is like the impression left by the telling of a story."<
Hi Avy,
This is irresistible to me.
I am rather against turning the sentence on its head, even though we occidentals rather tend to do so.
I suspect the sage meant that when a story is told, each listener gets a different impression, yet these impressions are the closest we can get to the "real" story, i.e. the world. The phrase is an attempt to reconcile the existence of a single "reality" with the impossibility of ever knowing it in its original form: a task most philosophers have tackled in their youth, before getting entangled in the problems of ethics.