One Way Rather Than Another

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 Eugene Fish (1938 -), American literary theorist and legal scholar, and Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 4, What Is A Good Sentence?, p. 42