Stanley Fish > Quotes

“The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.”
― Stanley Fish

“This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“Verbal fluency is the product of hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is hte product of hours spent repeating scales.” p. 26”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.”
― Stanley Fish

“...words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time.”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere.”
― Stanley Fish

“No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.”
― Stanley Fish

“And yet that performance has a method. Trump's artlessness, like Mark Antony's, is only apparent. Listen, for example, as he performs one of his favorite riffs. He begins by saying something critical of Mexicans and Chinese. Then he turns around and says, 'I love the Mexican and Chinese people, especially the rich ones who buy my apartments or stay at my hotels or play on my golf courses.' It's their leaders I criticize, he explains, but then in a millisecond he pulls the sting from the criticism: 'they are smarter and stronger than our leaders; they're beating us.' And then the payoff all this has been leading up to, the making explicit of what has been implied all along. 'If I can sell them condominiums, rent space to them in my building at my price, and outfox them in deals, I could certainly outmaneuver them when it came to trade negotiations and immigration.' (And besides, they love me.)

Here is the real message, the message that makes sense of the disparate pieces of what looks like mere disjointed fumbling: I am Donald Trump; nobody owns me. I don't pander to you. I don't pretend to be nice and polite; I am rich and that's what you would like to be; I'm a winner; I beat people at their own game, and if you vote for me I will beat our adversaries; if you want wonky policy details, go with those losers who offer you ten-point plans; if you want to feel good about yourselves and your country, stick with me.

So despite the lack of a formal center or an orderly presentation, Trump was always on point because the point was always the same. He couldn't get off message because the one message was all he had.”
― Stanley Fish

“Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitcher's mound -- without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you can't walk the walk.”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, "Do you think I could be a writer?" "'Well,' the writer said, 'do you like sentences?'" The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that "if he likes sentences he could begin," and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I like the smell of paint.'" The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabour it), is that you don't begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.”
― Stanley Fish

“My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all thou sayest, but thou art also (Lord, I intend it to thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to thy dimunition), thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too, a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments, such sinews even in thy milk, and such things in thy words, as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps, thou art the Dove that flies.

(Donne, Devotions 1624, as quoted in Fish, How to Write a Sentence p 142)”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead. The shaping power of language cannot be avoided. We cannot choose to distance ourselves from it. We can n choose to employ it in one way rather than another. (42)”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.”
― Stanley Fish

“One day the Nouns were clustered in the street. An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty The Nouns were struck, moved, changed. The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“What is a sentence, anyway?”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“In his great book How to Do Things with Words (1962), J.L. Austin considers the apparently simple sentence "France is hexagonal." He asks if this is true or false, a question that makes perfect sense if the job of a sentence is to be faithful to the world. His answer is that it depends. If you are a general contemplating a coming battle, saying that France is hexagonal might help you assess various military options of defense and attack; it would be a good sentence. But if you are a geographer charged with the task of mapping France's contours, saying that France is hexagonal might cost you your union card; a greater degree of detail and fineness of scale is required of mapmakers. "France is hexagonal," Austin explains, is true "for certain intents and purposes" and false or inadequate or even nonsensical for others. It is, he says, a matter of the "dimension of assessment" -- that is, a matter of what is the "right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing in these circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these intentions.”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“If you persuade liberalism that its dismissive marginalizing of religious discourse is a violation of its own chief principle, all you will gain is the right to sit down at liberalism’s table where before you were denied an invitation; but it will still be liberalism’s table that you are sitting at, and the etiquette of the conversation will still be hers.”
― Stanley Fish

“What, after all, is the difference between a sectarian school which disallows challenges to the divinity of Christ and a so-called nonideological school which disallows discussion of the same question? In both contexts something goes without saying and something else cannot be said (Christ is not God or he is). There is of course a difference, not however between a closed environment and an open one but between environments that are differently closed.”
― Stanley Fish

“What you can compose depends on what you’re composed of.”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“It is often said that the job of language is to report or reflect or mirror reality, but the power of language is greater and more dangerous than that; it shapes reality, not of course in a literal sense - the world is one thing, words another - but in the sense that the order imposed on a piece of the world by a sentence is only one among innumerable possible orders.”
― Stanley Fish

“Wij hebben geen onvervreemdbaar en 'natuurlijk' recht op het vrije woord. Elke samenleving zal bepaalde uitingen pornografisch of opruiend achten en taboe verklaren. De betekenis van zowel 'vrij' als 'woord' wordt doorlopend aangepast om aan de behoeften van de gemeenschap tegemoet te komen.”
― Stanley Fish, There's No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing, Too

“Evanescence can be produced by language that in its mundane use sits inert on the page.”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

“The moral is clear: the choice is never between objectivity and interpretation but between an interpretation that is unacknowledged as such and an interpretation that is at least aware of itself.”
― Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities

“Content must take center stage, for the expression of content is what writing is for.”
― Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One