Stanley Fish Quotes & Sayings

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

It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories. — 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

A pro-choice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs. — 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

In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective. — 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

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

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

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn. — 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

Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved. — Stanley Fish

The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story. — 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

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

No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure. — 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

Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere. — 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

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?' — Stanley Fish

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

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not. — Stanley Fish

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

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

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

It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in a position to say definitively what that is - although we all think that we are. — Stanley Fish

I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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