Naming Quotes

“Elodin pointed down the street. "What color is that boy's shirt?"

"Blue."

"What do you mean by blue? Describe it."

I struggled for a moment, failed. "So blue is a name?"

"It is a word. Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man's will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself."

My head was swimming by this point. "I still don't understand."

He laid a hand on my shoulder. "Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating." He lifted his hands high above his head as if stretching for the sky. "But there are other ways to understanding!" he shouted, laughing like a child. He threw both arms to the cloudless arch of sky above us, still laughing. "Look!" he shouted tilting his head back. "Blue! Blue! Blue!”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“There is a Quichua riddle: El que me nombra, me rompe. Whatever names me, breaks me. The solution, your course, is "silence." But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in two.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Most of us have nicknames—annoying, endearing, embarrassing.

But what about your true name?

It is not necessarily your given name. But it is the one to which you are most eager to respond when called.

Ever wonder why?

Your true name has the secret power to call you.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Hello, Lucy. Do you name all your weapons, Grunthor?”

“O’ course. It’s tradition.”

Rhapsody nodded, understanding coming into her eyes. “That makes perfect sense. Do you find that you fight better with a weapon you’ve named?”

“Yep.”

Her eyes began to sparkle with excitement. “Why, Grunthor, in a way, you’re a Namer, too!”

The giant broke into a pleased grin. “Well, whaddaya know. Should Oi sing a lit’le song?”

“No,” said Rhapsody and Achmed in unison.”
― Elizabeth Haydon, Rhapsody: Child of Blood

“I speculate over some of the Anglo nomenclature of birds: Wilson's snipe, Forster's tern . . . : What natural images do these names conjure up in our minds? What integrity do we give back to the birds with our labels.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

“They called him John Storm: John after his grandfather, but Storm after his father and his mother.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“What's your name?'
'Names!' she sniffed, rolling her eyes. 'People always want names, don't they? They're mad about naming. I will let the moment name me.' she eyed Jack expectantly.
'You want me to name you?' he asked.
'People from the other side are very dull,' she sighed.
'Give yourself a name for me. I don't need naming for myself, do I?”
― Isobelle Carmody, Greylands

“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, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass

“From the day whe arrived at her husband's home, no one called her by her name.”
― Lauretta Ngcobo, And They Didn't Die

“The action of a thing is the same as the naming of it - is, in fact, the real name. The trees creak and they are saying, 'trees creak through the long night.' The long night - what is it? Trees creaking. There wasn't anything that tied life's moments together, except life. And when it was gone?”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“To let blessed babies go dangling and dawdling without names, for months and months, was enough to ruin them for life.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, The Birds' Christmas Carol

“We are not how the universe knows itself.
We are how humans know the universe.
Words and thoughts are our way of knowing, not THE way of knowing.
Translating a mountain into a word, into a measurement, does not bring new knowledge into the world, it brings new knowledge into us. The mountain was perfectly in touch with its own wholeness without neurons, without language, without learning our name for it.
We may have spotted the shores of understanding from our small boat, but we certainly didn't invent them.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Love Notes From The Hollow Tree

“[N]ames were what you wore forever, and she felt that she'd sent her daughters out in tacky rabbit fur coats when they should have been wrapped in mink.”
― Sheri Holman, The Mammoth Cheese

“We're OConchobhairs and they're our friends. Dad always said that what our name means - friend of the wolves.”
― Kirsty Murray, Bridie's Fire

“I control the world so long as I can name it.”
― Penelope Lively

“Strawberry?”
He kept his hand on the bear. “It’s silly. The bear’s name.”
“Why is that?” I kept my voice low and calm.
“All my bears are berries. So, like, there’s Blueberry and Boysenberry and Raspberry and Roddenberry.”
“Roddenberry?”
“Um, you know, the creator of Star Trek.”
― Wendy Rathbone, Little Boy Mine

“. Adam never actually got his authority over the animals through naming them! Verse 1:26 of Genesis states, “Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings* in our image, to be like ourselves. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on Earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.”

As shown with the verse above, naming, which includes the naming of the animals and later on the naming of Eve, was not what gave Adam his authority over the animals. God alone gave human beings the authority to “reign over” the animals. Naming did nothing. This exemplifies that naming, indeed, had a negligible impact on a being’s level of authority. God was the only being who created the dichotomy between animals and humanity, in which the former, through God, not through naming, is of a comparatively lower status than the latter”
― Lucy Carter, Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics

“Adam was not applying the action of naming to exert and apply authority over the beings he named; he did it for the purpose of finding a helper. When Adam named Eve, therefore, he was not exerting authority over her, since naming had no impact on Adam’s authority over the animals.”
― Lucy Carter, Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics

“The light moved within itself and flared up. A pillar of light tore into the darkness and there it found matter that had been immobile forever. It struck it with full force, until it awoke God in it. Still unconscious, still unsure what He was, God looked around Him, and as He saw no one apart from Himself, He realised that He was God. And unnamed for Himself, incomprehensible to Himself, He felt the desire to know Himself. When He looked closely at Himself for the first time, the Word came forth –it seemed to God that knowing was naming.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times

“…for to name a thing is to give it order and purpose...”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“my heart takes the way of incurvatus in se, this curving in toward self—self-sufficiency, self-protection, self-comfort, self-interest. It’s the bent way of being human: We’re wired for attachment, for dependence on God, but our inclination toward incurvatus in se turns the direction of our dependence towards destructive things, and our attachments go awry. All addiction is an attachment in the wrong direction. Name your pain, name the way you try to make the pain go away, and you name your addiction. Name your default direction. Name the way you turn for comfort—a glass, a screen, a plate, a sweet, a drug, a page, a voice, a click, a hit, a rush, a bottle—go ahead and name what you curve to, to comfort your ache, and you name your Egypt that looks like ease.”
― Ann Voskamp, WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

“…it was the first time someone had imposed the label “German” on me to enroll me among the followers of Hitler. This violence of identity pinned on you by the other and uttered like a condemnation…”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“I thought about having a child, naming it after you. Then I realized that child would never know its namesake & that it’s not fair to want someone just because you want someone else. Instead I named other things for you: seasons with the most holidays, the sky’s face seven seconds before or after it hails, the sound a heart hears when it is half returned, the first time I won a fight, anytime I lose anything.”
― Siaara Freeman, Urbanshee

“My insecurities demand that I put you in a box that you were not created for so that I might live the ignorant life that I was not created for.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“[Citing "Alice in Wonderland"] the White Knight insists on singing Alice a song which he introduces as follows:

'The name of the song is called "Haddocks' Eyes".'

'Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to feel interested.

'No, you don't understand,' the Knichgt said, looking a little vexed. 'That's what the name is called. The name really is "The Aged Aged Man".”
― Dennis Duncan, Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age

“Naming is a form of power. It cements a commitment to the subject of your expertise and, in the case of nature, often an ancestral continuity, too. Naming is an assertion of meaning, and in turn it creates meaning. It allows us to greet the things we know like old friends.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“The words of gods and men are names of things
And thoughts accustom'd : but of things unknown
And unimagin'd are no words at all.”
― Robert Bridges, Demeter: A Mask

“Once people have a name for something, their tendency is to think they understand it and once they think they understand it, they quit experiencing it fresh and new each time they encounter it. Should the name itself be inaccurate it starts a chain of cultural and individual events that lead to outcomes that are not predictable in the initial act of naming.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature

“To write means renaming the space around you, describing it as if it were something else.”
― Mónica Ojeda, Nefando

“Your name will call you forward without compromise or second-guessing. (p. xii)”
― Melanie DewBerry, The Power of Naming: A Journey toward Your Soul's Indigenous Nature