Stanley Fish on language & meaning

Stanley Fish on language & meaning: 

"Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere. Once the words are nested in the places ‘ordained’ for them — ‘ordained’ is a wonderful word that points to the inexorable logic of syntactic structures — they are tied by ligatures of relationships to one another. They are subjects or objects or actions or descriptives or indications of manner, and as such they combine into... a meaning that one can contemplate, admire, reject, or refine.”

Stanley Fish, How to write a sentence (and how to read one), pg. 2 (Harper Press, 2011).