Stanley Fish Quotes

Words belong to each other.

Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.

Words are all we have.

If we are to look only at the words, then we inquire, not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker.

Words can carry any burden we wish. All that's required is agreement and a tradition upon which to build.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

No matter where we live, we have to use words. Once you've been looking into words, their stories, it's easy to fall in love with them.

There is no standard for truth. We cannot even agree on the meaning of words.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged. It is the skin of a living thought and may vary in color and context according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.

Words are only as good as the response to those words.

I was fascinated by the shape of words even before I knew what they meant.

My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

A language is the appearances of connections therefore language as in writing doesn't express anything: it creates.

For language to have meaning, there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. He who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him. For the mercy of God is not heard in words unless it is heard, both before and after the words are spoken, in silence.

The investigation of the meaning of words is the beginning of education.

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.

The words that are coming out of my mouth and how I mean them, it's so much different.

All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning.

The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.

Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.