Stanley Fish Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them,..

Stanley Fish
Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?

Stanley Fish
The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.

Stanley Fish
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
Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

Stanley Fish
They are their own monuments, as is this quietly thrilling sentence.

Stanley Fish
The category of first sentence makes sense only if it is looking forward to the development of thematic concerns it perhaps only dimly foreshadows.

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
Despite the apparent absoluteness of the First Amendment, there are any number of ways of getting around it, ways that are known to any student of law. In general, the strategy is to manipulate the distinction between speech and action which is at bottom a distinction between inconsequential and consequential behavior.

Stanley Fish
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
We marvel at [good sentences]; we read them aloud to our friends and spouses, even, occasionally, to passersby; we analyze them; we lament our inability to match them.

Stanley Fish
Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

Stanley Fish
I do not support abortion rights. Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me.

Stanley Fish
Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors.

Stanley Fish
Opinion-sharing sessions are like junk food: they fill you up with starch and leave you feeling both sated and hungry. A sustained inquiry into the truth of a matter is an almost athletic experience; it may exhaust you, but it also improves you.

Stanley Fish
Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.

Stanley Fish
Just as you can practice three - word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.

Stanley Fish
What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as is appears within a dimension of assessment.

Stanley Fish
It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.

Stanley Fish