Names Quotes - Page 2

I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.

Julia Glass

He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words—sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange to us, because they had not been in England. We named the things of this place in reference to things that were not of this place—cat briar for the thickets of vine whose thorns were narrow and claw-like; lambskill for the low-growing laurel that had proved poisonous to some of our hard-got tegs. But there had been no cats or lambs here until we brought them. So when he named a plant or a creature, I felt that I heard the true name of the thing for the first time.

Geraldine Brooks

We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc. That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on. But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time. ...Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker. It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions).

Gregory Bateson

The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.

Ben Marcus

Psycholinguists argue about whether language reflects our perception of reality or helps create them. I am in the latter camp. Take the names we give the animals we eat. The Patagonian toothfish is a prehistoric-looking creature with teeth like needles and bulging yellowish eyes that lives in deep waters off the coast of South America. It did not catch on with sophisticated foodies until an enterprising Los Angeles importer renamed it the considerably more palatable "Chilean sea bass.

Hal Herzog

None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm, that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.

Ursula K Le Guin

When we have learnt to call storms, storms, and death, death, and birth, birth, when we have mastered the sailor's horn-book and Mr Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's anatomy and Lewer's midwifery, we have already made ourself half blind. We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed.

Henry de Vere Stacpoole

Does it, does it—I'm flailing here—does it have a name? What you've

Jess Row

You presume to name those who have no name. We are pandemonium and disaster. We are the dancing, gibbering horror of the world.

Brenna Yovanoff

It's poor judgment', said Grandpa 'to call anything by a name. We don't know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can't heave them into categories with labels and say they'll act one way or another. That'd be silly. They're people. People who do things. Yes, that's the way to put it. People who *do* things.

Ray Bradbury

He pulls the gun away from his head and sets it on the coffee table. He wonders who first called it a coffee table. He gets to his feet and walks into the hallway. He wonders who first called it a highway. He wonder who first named anything. How did someone look at a dog and decide what to call it? It’s all so random. Everything is so goddamn random.

Ryan David Jahn

No," said the cat. "Now, you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.

Neil Gaiman

What's in a name?

William Shakespeare

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.

Cormac McCarthy

An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented . I am invented. I am not a round warm blue room. I am someone in that room; I am—

Samuel R. Delany

Most of us have nicknames—annoying, endearing, embarrassing.But what about your true

Vera Nazarian

She squinted at his nametag. Her eyes weren't quite working. "What's your name?" "Stig.""Stick?" she asked, half ready to believe it. He shook his head and pointed his long index finger at the name stitched on his uniform. "S-T-I-G. Stig."Harriet's breath caught. "I can't believe it. I've been looking for you.

Kimberly Karalius

No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.

Ursula K Le Guin

If you don't know a name, you can't be hurt when they go. I have no friends anymore, all are lost.

Patricia Hamill

Many confuse things with their names. This is a mistake. A name is only a word and a word will never be the thing itself. And, yet, names – as words – have power, not inherently, but because we give it to them.

Roselynn Cannes

All words are possible, then, all names. They rain down, all these words, they disintegrate into a powdery avalanche. Belched from the volcano's mouth, they spurt in to the sky, then fall again. In the quivering air, like gelatine, the sounds trace their bubble paths. Can you imagine that?

Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Conventional names define a person's past: ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, religion. I am not who I was ten years ago and certainly not who I will be in twenty years

FM-2030

How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "green"?

Stan Brakhage

Names are powerful and so is destiny, but a person's will is more powerful than both put together.

Liesl Shurtliff

Names are powerful and are prophecies of the future. The name you are called is a sign of what you are and what you would become.

Jude Idada

Caleb and Aaron—now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.

John Steinbeck

Names aren't loners, they're connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny.

Catherynne M. Valente

I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can't. I have failed to destroy my category.

Ben Marcus

Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.

Maya Angelou

But hereto is replied that the poets give names to men they write of, which argueth a conceit of an actual truth, and so, not being true, proveth a falsehood. And doth the lawyer lie then, when, under the names of John of the Stile, and John of the Nokes, he putteth his case? But that is easily answered: their naming of men is but to make their picture the more lively, and not to build any history. Painting men, they cannot leave men nameless. We see we cannot play at chess but that we must give names to our chess-men; and yet, me thinks, he were a very partial champion of truth that would say we lied for giving a piece of wood the reverend title of a bishop.

Philip Sidney

My grandmother, a dim, stern figure, named her children Lily and Violet, which I guess from seeing a picture of my mother's paved, ugly backyard, was the nearest she came to a garden.

Emma Joy Crone

New Rule: Don't name your kid after a ballpark. Cubs fans Paul and Teri Fields have named their newborn son Wrigley. Wrigley Fields. A child is supposed to be an independent individual, not a means of touting your own personal hobbies. At least that's what I've always taught my kids, Panama Red and Jacuzzi.

Bill Maher

Glimmer, I hear someone call her - ugh, the names the people in District 1 give their children are so ridiculous ...

Suzanne Collins

What if my name was Daniel, Lucas, Noah. Lucas Harris, That doesn't sound right. I think I'll stick with Nate.

Nathan Harris

Knowing the names of things is a way to pay respect to the beauty of the world...

Dean Koontz

A named thing is a tamed thing.

Joanne Harris

Young man, names are powerful things. You don’t just go around using them for no reason.

Rick Riordan

Names have power.

Rick Riordan

I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more.

John Fowles

Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth; can be, in fact, icons. It's no coincidence that Jesus taught almost entirely by telling stories, simple stories dealing with the stuff of life familiar to the Jews of his day. Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos.

Madeleine L'Engle

Achievements take leaders' name everywhere. Character keeps those names wherever they reach. A leader with no trust soon fades no matter how far he goes.

Israelmore Ayivor

The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them.

W Somerset Maugham

Benazir Bhutto doesn't cease to exist the moment she gets married. I am not giving myself away. I belong to myself and I always shall.

Benazir Bhutto

When a man modifies or adorns a woman's name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself.

Ben Marcus

What’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back, now.You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank.Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve even heard the term “mangina.”Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up.

Jessica Valenti

Maxim 16: Your name is in the mouth of others: be sure it has teeth.-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries

Howard Tayler

Letitia! What a name. Halfway between a salad and a sneeze.

Terry Pratchett

That's what America's all about, man, if it's about anything. You can choose your own name.

Michael Ventura

The Great Stone at the center of the Somme memorial has this inscription: “Their name liveth for evermore.” The memorial contains 73,077 names, the names of young men who were robbed of life. Note that we often say that they gave their lives, but of course, this is not true; their lives were taken from them. It is not outrageous to consider the carving of their names and the false promise of “evermore” another act of violence.

Nel Noddings

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.

Winston S. Churchill

We judge us by our names.

Raubin Chaudhary

People often lose their names. Names fall into holes or get eaten by wild animals. Sometimes they’re carried away by the wind.

Eliza Granville

A name can't begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that's the magic of names, isn't it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name.

Charles de Lint

Before a Cat will condescendTo treat you as a trusted friend,Some little token of esteemIs needed, like a dish of cream;And you might now and then supplySome caviare, or Strassburg Pie,Some potted grouse, or salmon paste —He's sure to have his personal taste.(I know a Cat, who makes a habitOf eating nothing else but rabbit,And when he's finished, licks his pawsSo's not to waste the onion sauce.)A Cat's entitled to expectThese evidences of respect.And so in time you reach your aim,And finally call him by his name.

T.S Eliot

It was no accident that one of the first things God asked of Adam was for him to name the animals he saw around him. Why do you suppose God asked man to do that? Because once you have a name, you have the beginning of understanding, and once you have understanding, you lose fear. God didn’t want man to be fearful. He wanted man to be brave.

John Kramer

Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.

Galileo Galilei

Well," Mr. Cheeseman interjected. "Perhaps there's an easy solution to this. Maybe Captain Fabulous has an alter ego.""What's an alter ego?" asked Gerard."It's a superhero's true but secret identity," said Chip. "You know, the way that Superman is really Clark Kent." "Superman is really Clark Kent?""It's pretty obvious," said Penny. "To everyone but you and Lois Lane.""Okay," Gerard conceded. "Captain Fabulous's alter ego will be...Teddy Roosevelt.

Cuthbert Soup

If my name was Richard, I'd go by Richard or Rich...not Dick. Hell I'd even settle for being called Chard.

Simone Elkeles

So what's your team called?" asked Kate, twisting her legs into a pretzel-like configuration, "We're called the Winmates because we're inmates who win." Kate looked back and forth at Reynie and Constance, searching their expression for signs of delight. "You gave yourselves a name?" asked Constance. Now it was Kate's turn to be baffled. "You didn't? How can you have a team without a name?

Trenton Lee Stewart

Previous 1 2 3 Next

Names Quotes - Page 2

Related Topics