"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 Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is 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
"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."
"Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere."
"No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure."
"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."
"Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors."
"Fish has raised careerism to a worldview. In this way, he is a man for our time."