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Stanley Fish Quotes

Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Fish is associated with postmodernism, at times to his irritation. Instead he views himself as an advocate of anti-foundationalism. He is also viewed as being an influence in the rise and development of reader-response theory.

During his career he has also taught at the Cardozo School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, The University of Pennsylvania, Yale Law School, Columbia University, The John Marshall Law School, and Duke University. Wikipedia  

✵ 19. April 1938
Stanley Fish: 18 quotes0 likes

Famous Stanley Fish Quotes

“The structure of a fully articulated profession is such that those who enter its precincts will find that the basic decisions, about where to look, what to do, and how to do it, have already been made.”

Stanley Fish

as cited in Historics: Why History Dominates Contemporary Society, p. 135

“We marvel at them; 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

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 1, Why Sentences?, p. 4

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

Stanley Fish

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 2, Why You Don't Find The Answer In Strunk And White, p. 17

“Literary interpretation, like virtue, is its own reward. I do it because I like the way I feel when I'm doing it.”

Stanley Fish

Interview by Mark Bauerlein, " A Solitary Thinker https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Solitary-Thinker/127464," The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 15, 2001

“They are their own monuments, as is this quietly thrilling sentence.”

Stanley Fish

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 9, Last Sentences, p. 130

“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

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 4, What Is A Good Sentence?, p. 37

Stanley Fish 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

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 10, Sentences That Are About Themselves (Aren't They All?), p. 137

“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

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 6, The Additive Style, p. 62

“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

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 3, It's Not The Thought That Counts, p. 33

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

Stanley Fish

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 4, What Is A Good Sentence?, p. 42

“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

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 4, What Is A Good Sentence?, p. 39

“Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors.”

Stanley Fish

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 4, What Is A Good Sentence?, p. 38

“Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?”

Stanley Fish

Epilogue, p. 160
How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011)

“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

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 5, The Subordinate Style, p. 48

“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

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 8, First Sentences, p. 99

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

Stanley Fish

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 1, Why Sentences?, p. 2

“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

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 3, It's Not The Thought That Counts, p. 26

“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 only choose to employ it in one way rather than another.”

Stanley Fish

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 4, What Is A Good Sentence?, p. 42

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