names

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

Many who have learnedfrom Hesiod the countless namesof gods and monstersnever understandthat night and day are one

The way he said her name made my heart cramp. In all my years of word collecting, I've learned this to be a tried and true fact: I can very often tell how much a person loves another person by the way they say their name. I think that's one of the best feelings in the world, when you know your name is safe in another person's mouth. When you know they'll never shout it out like a cuss word, but say it or whisper it like a once-upon-a-time.

Jackson," he mused. "Not a name either one of you was born to."Lizzie answered, "No. But beyond a certain point, names become accessories. We swap them out as needed, for the sake of peace. You understand?""I understand. Though I disagree. Names aren't hats to change a look, or a suit to be swapped at a whim. Words mean things.""Then we must agree to disagree.

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.

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?

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

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

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

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.

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

Caleb and Aaron__ow you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.

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.

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

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__ do that. Some day we__l 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.

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.

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.

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.