How to Write a Sentence Quotes

“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

“...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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“What is a sentence, anyway?”
― 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

“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

“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

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

“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