In personal tribute to Joshua A. Fishman, I tell a few stories about this remarkable scholar as I got to know him – a glimpse of the person behind the great ideas that have so powerfully shaped our thinking. My many vivid memories of things Fishman said or wrote in my personal encounters with him – often pithy one-liners – are testimony to the power of his mind and voice, his spirit and soul. From my first year of Ph.D. study when I took his course Sociology of Bilingual Education at the 1980 Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, through our interactions over the succeeding decades at conferences and talks, in personal visits and interviews, and around publications he invited me to write or vice versa, Fishman’s influence on my own academic career was enduring and profound. My turn to honor Professor Fishman for all he did for scholarship, globally, and for me, personally, came in the intergenerational symposium we organized for him at Penn in honor of his 80th birthday in 2006. My hope is that these personal stories begin to convey the intellectual giant Joshua A. Fishman was.