Naming Quotes

Although I am deeply grateful to a great many people, I forgo the temptation of naming them for fear that I might slight any by omission. ~ Theodore Bikel

Jimmy Carter began his planning in the early summer of 1976, Ronald Reagan a year prior. The Clinton Administration, elected in 1992, lingered in naming its team, and as a result, took almost a year to staff its ranks. ~ Richard V. Allen

Why don't you join us? You can be Chief in Charge of Running Away Scared and Naming Things. -Allie ~ Rebecca Espinoza

The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Craig, he says, in that tone that's like, I'm one step away from middle-naming you. ~ Hannah Moskowitz

Naming the Cat

I called my cat 'mystery',
she ignored the name;
using some very cat-like disdain.
Waiting a while I named her again,
asking her spirit to share in the game.
Now more allowing to me she came;
still not releasing the cat-like disdain. ~ Leland Lewis

Lack of personal morality plus "politically correct" prohibition against judging others' behavior and naming immorality sets up a social environment receptive and vulnerable to a tyrannical government. A tyrannical government transforms every aspect of the cultural day-to-day lives of everyone under its control across all areas from the educational and penal systems to fine art and entertainment dictates right on down to housing regulations and food availabilities. ~ Alexandra York

They called him John Storm: John after his grandfather, but Storm after his father and his mother. ~ John Crowley

All organisms can make the most basic distinctions--between food and not-food, danger and safety, light and dark, same-species and not-same. But only people can use language to make the highly complex categorizations of, say, animals or physical forces, or however many different kinds of quarks there are now, putting them in separate piles and naming the piles. It's how we proceed; it's how we communicate. Organization into categories is, at bottom, human. ~ Scott Huler

None of us kids had a middle name. We were lucky we had any name at all. By the time my mother got around to naming one, there was another on the way. ~ George Burns

Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles ... In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma ... The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972 ... The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time. ~ Naomi Wolf

I have always been obsessed with naming things. If I could name them, I could know them. If I could name them, I could tame them. They could be my friends. ~ Eve Ensler

The multiplicity of human identity is not just a spiritual principle, it's a biological fact - a basic ecological reality. ... only 10% of the cells in your body belong to you. The rest are the cells of bacteria and microorganisms that call your body home, and without these symbionts living on and within your physical self, you would be unable to digest and process the nutrients necessary to keep you alive. Your physical body is teeming with a microscopic diversity of life that rivals a rainforest. The insight of the Gaia Theory - that "the Earth system behaves as a single self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components" - is as much a statement about our own physical bodies as it is about the planet. If we imagine the Earth as the body of a goddess, we can also imagine our own bodies as a sacred home to an ecologically complex and diverse array of microscopic life." -- Alison Leigh Lilly, "Naming the Water: Human and Deity Identity from an Earth-Centered Perspective ~ John Halstead

Language as a Prison

The Philippines did have a written language before the Spanish colonists arrived, contrary to what many of those colonists subsequently claimed. However, it was a language that some theorists believe was mainly used as a mnemonic device for epic poems. There was simply no need for a European-style written language in a decentralized land of small seaside fishing villages that were largely self-sufficient.

One theory regarding language is that it is primarily a useful tool born out of a need for control. In this theory written language was needed once top-down administration of small towns and villages came into being. Once there were bosses there arose a need for written language. The rise of the great metropolises of Ur and Babylon made a common written language an absolute necessity - but it was only a tool for the administrators. Administrators and rulers needed to keep records and know names - who had rented which plot of land, how many crops did they sell, how many fish did they catch, how many children do they have, how many water buffalo? More important, how much then do they owe me? In this account of the rise of written language, naming and accounting seem to be language's primary "civilizing" function. Language and number are also handy for keeping track of the movement of heavenly bodies, crop yields, and flood cycles. Naturally, a version of local oral languages was eventually translated into symbols as well, and nonadmi ~ David Byrne

And now, it turns out that our mother's name means benevolence and generosity to people as objects of love! This is both a unique and beautiful name, Charity. "It was one of life's cruel ironies," I thought, "that a midwife, or whoever filled in the documents, must have known our mom's name. I suppose she had a lot of fun naming us Hope and Faith! Or, on the contrary, she sympathized. ~ Igor Eliseev

But one thing I'd figured out about labels early on: naming something didn't actually help you fix it. That was really all psychology was. It catalogued mental diseases, made neat little charts with symptoms and checkboxes. It couldn't cure a damn thing - least of all me. Lance ~ Skye Warren

Naming rights are a seductive philanthropic inducement, yet more anonymous operational support may better advance the charitable purpose. ~ George Kaiser

It is the first act. The primal thrust and scream.
Which is why the newborn's immediate deed and concern
Is to cry out. To release with great violence from
Its tiny throat exploding with fire and caked blood,
A name to walk upon the earth.

It is the naming of paradisal beasts, the first duty
Of man upon rising from the dirt and God's holy spittle.

But I did not know this at first. ~ Ramil Digal Gulle

When it comes to naming things, vanity and flattery are dull motivations best suited for deciding on a child's middle name. Much more interesting are the descriptive names that suggest a story or happening of interest. ~ J. Maarten Troost

Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence - by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present - but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word 'quarters' the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being. ~ Slavoj Zizek

She marveled at the futility of his method: he was acting as if, by naming her opinion in advance, he would make her unable to alter it. ~ Ayn Rand

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

My fans have always been so supportive, and several years ago, I realized that I could thank them by naming all my characters after my Twitter and Facebook fans. ~ Neal Shusterman

Your unavowed atrocities kill you from the inside out. What is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? Jacqueline Delon had asked. She was wrong. It's a survival necessity. You can't live if you can't accept what you are, and you can't accept what you are if you can't say what you do. The power of naming, as old as Adam. ~ Glen Duncan

Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which people transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. People are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection. ~ Paulo Freire

This policy of naming things after dates was one of the practices meant to maintain the cult of propaganda surrounding our heads of state, but it was only much later that I understood this. Every ~ Eunsun Kim

You're saying that man "makes" his territory by naming the "things" in it? ~ Bruce Chatwin

The action of naming an issue instead of evading it, was so unlike the usual behavior of all the men he knew, it was such a sudden, startling relief ... ~ Ayn Rand

How funny your name would be if you could follow it back to where the first person thought of saying it, naming himself that, or maybe some other persons thought of it and named that person. It would be like following a river to its source, which would be impossible. Rivers have no source. ~ John Ashbery

There is no word in any traditional European language which does not either denigrate or patronize the urban poor it is naming. That is power. ~ John Berger

Green tree. Pretty lady. Car. Car. Truck," she recites, naming out loud almost everything she sees. "Don't mind me, I'm a gabberbox," she chuckles. "A gabberbox?" I ask, confused at her term. "You know, hon, I talk a lot," she explains before breaking into a laugh that is eerily familiar. ~ John Waters

Naming of things as they are, without embellishment, make approachable those afflictive emotions and heavy states that obscure the heart. We know that we can't let go of anything we don't accept, the noting brings us into the presence of that which often distracts us from the present. It allows the healing in. And as we observe the appearance of things, we more easily acknowledge their subsequent disappearance, and some come to an appreciation of impermanence. ~ Stephen Levine

We are a mixed up people. We have mixed up ways of naming, too ... When my father's brothers and sisters first went to colonial schools, they had to produce a surname. They also had to show they were good Christians by adopting a western name. They adopted my grandfather's name as surname. Wainaina. ~ Binyavanga Wainaina

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit - and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame ~ Jeff VanderMeer

The truth of no truths becomes, inevitably, truth: a way of naming being, language, and culture that guards the boundaries of thought against claims it has not validated. ~ David Bentley Hart

Naming a book after a person was a standard way of reflecting that person's beliefs or representing his or her school of thought. ~ Reza Aslan

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. ~ Oscar Wilde

So that would be my input and I'd go off and I'd work on another film, and then I'd catch up with them later on in the year. We just kind of nursed the piece along. There was no timeframe. We didn't have anyone pushing us except ourselves to make the film, and a desire. And then the organic kind of naming of Roger; then it happened really fast. ~ Pierce Brosnan

By the time she had picked every visible corpse off her property, the heap included ants, beetles and cockroaches, different kinds of spiders, some bees, flies, a wasp, two fetid lizard skins and the brittle remains of their skeletons, six butterflies, a stick insect the length of her forearm, two dragonflies, a handful of crickets and other creatures that in the world of naming remained untitled. The collection measured a full hand deep. She paid no attention to the odour rising out of the bucket. The scent of decay was not offensive to her. It was the aroma of life refusing to end. It was the aroma of transformation. Such odour was proof that nothing truly ended, and she revelled in it as much as she did the cereus blossoms along the back wall of the house. ~ Shani Mootoo

-You know how to call me
although such a noise now
would only confuse the air
Neither of us can forget
the steps we danced
the words you stretched
to call me out of dust
Yes I long for you
not just as a leaf for weather
or vase for hands
but with a narrow human longing
that makes a man refuse
any fields but his own
I wait for you at an
unexpected place in your journey
like the rusted key
or the feather you do not pick up.-

-I WILL NEVER FIND THE FACES
FOR ALL GOODBYES I'VE MADE.-


For Anyone Dressed in Marble
The miracle we all are waiting for
is waiting till the Parthenon falls down
and House of Birthdays is a house no more
and fathers are unpoisoned by renown.
The medals and the records of abuse
can't help us on our pilgrimage to lust,
but like whips certain perverts never use,
compel our flesh in paralysing trust.
I see an orphan, lawless and serene,
standing in a corner of the sky,
body something like bodies that have been,
but not the scar of naming in his eye.
Bred close to the ovens, he's burnt inside.
Light, wind, cold, dark -- they use him like a bride.


I Had It for a Moment

I had it for a moment
I knew why I must thank you
I saw powerful governing men in black suits
I saw them undressed
in the arms of young mistresses
the men more nake ~ Leonard Cohen

It has come to me of late that comparing one man's work to another's, naming one greater or lesser, is a wrong approach.

The important and only vital question is, how much greater, finer, am I than I was yesterday? Have I fulfilled my possibilities, made the most of my potentialities?

What a marvellous world if all would, - could hold this attitude toward life. ~ Edward Weston

NAMING THE EARTH
(a poem of light for national poetry day)

And the world will be born again
in circles of steaming breath
and beams of light
as each one of us directs
our inner eye
upon its name.

Hear the cry of wings,
the sigh of leaves and grass,
smell the new sweet mist rising
as the pathway is cleared at last.

Stones stand ready -
they have known
since ages and ages ago
that they were not alone.

Water carries the planet's energy
into skies and down
to earth and bones.

The cold parts steadily
as we come together,
bodies and hearts warm,
hands tingling.
We are silent
but our eyes are singing.

We look, we feel, we know,
we trust each other's souls,
we have no need to speak.
Not now, but later,
when the time is right,
the name will ring
within the iron core
of each other's listening -
and the very earth's being.

Every creature, every plant,
will hear it calling,
tolling like a bell -
a sound we've always felt
but never dared to hope
to hear reverberating -
true at last, at every level
of existence.

The poets come together
to open the intimate centre.
Believe
in life and air -
breathe the light itself,
for these are the energies
and rhythms that we need
to see, to touch, to reach,
t ~ Jay Woodman

I'm thinking about naming my first son Emmy so I can say I've got one. I want Emmy, Oscar and Tony - and my daughter Grammy. ~ Noah Wyle

While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture, then another.
Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chiefly have liked to see of his work, paintings in what an English art journal which lay about on the reading-room table in the Grand Hotel called his first and second manners, the mythological manner and the manner in which he shewed signs of Japanese influence, both admirably exemplified, the article said, in the collection of Mme. de Guermantes. Naturally enough, what he had in his studio were almost all seascapes done here, at Balbec. But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew. ~ Marcel Proust

...by the time you've finished naming a thing, it has already changed and the name you gave it no longer defines it exactly... ~ Joann Sfar

The 'Chronicles of Narnia' have been favourites of mine since my childhood when I misread 'Aslan' as 'Alsatian' and was struck by the genius of naming a lion after a dog! ~ Chris Riddell

Don't underestimate the value of beginning a headline by naming the people you want to reach. ~ John Caples

Naming my favorite books feels like naming a favorite child - impossible. ~ Libba Bray

But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup.

As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I ha ~ Jeanette Winterson

Initially children use just a few names, mostly for familiar things and people. But when they are still just beginning to talk, many babies will suddenly start naming everything and asking for the names of everything they see. In fact, what'sat? is itself often one of the earliest words. An eighteen-month-old baby will go into a triumphant frenzy of pointing and naming: "What'sat! Dog! What'sat! Clock! What'sat juice, spoon, orange, high chair, clock! Clock! Clock!" Often this is the point at which even fondly attentive parents lose track of how many new words the baby has learned. It's as if the baby discovers that everything has a name, and this discovery triggers a kind of naming explosion. ~ Alison Gopnik

My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I'd read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She'd loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book's main character. It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don't get it. ~ Ron Rash

A policy of 'naming and shaming' is ineffective if everyone has been named and shamed. ~ John Kay

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

Most Like an Arch This Marriage
Most like an arch - an entrance which upholds
and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.
Mass made idea, and idea held in place.
A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.
Most like an arch - two weaknesses that lean
into a strength. Two fallings become firm.
Two joined abeyances become a term
naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.
Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is, what's strong and separate falters. All I do
at piling stone on stone apart from you
is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss
I am no more than upright and unset.
It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another's sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight. ~ John Ciardi

Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

There must be satisfaction gained in accurately naming the thing that torments you. ~ Miriam Toews

The final relationship that cannot be ignored is with disrupters:
They are individuals who cause trouble for sport - inciting opposition
to management for a variety of reasons, most of them petty.
Usually these people have good performance - that's their cover - and so
they are endured or appeased.
A company that manages people well takes disrupters head-on.
First they give them very tough evaluations, naming their bad behaviour
and demanding it change.
Usually it won't. Disrupters are a personality type.
If that's the case, get them out of the way of people trying to do their
jobs.
They're poison. ~ Jack Welch

For the Hebrews, names provided a direct link with the Creator. They understood words as being the creative fire of God, the 'black fire on white fire' of His Law. Every utterance and every act of creation through which He revealed Himself was not only word made flesh but fire made flesh.

The word for 'being', yesh, 'to exist' or 'to have substance' was flame–breathed.

The word for 'fire', esh, was embedded in the word for 'being' and in the very notion of 'being human'.

The rabbis were said to have asked: Why is the word for 'woman', ishah? Because she is fire, esh. Why is the word for 'man', ish? Because he too is fire, esh.

They noted that when the Hebrew letters for 'man' and 'woman' came together they produced a new word as part of the union: yah, a reference to Yahweh, the Name of God. ~ Anne Hamilton

If hard things ultimately have a purpose, then they aren't so hard anymore. Therefore, I listed what I had learned: 1. It's easy to forget that people can think you think what you don't think. 2. Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't. 3. A writer's greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer's greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both. ~ Gloria Steinem

Singing what's in your heart? Naming the things you love and loathe? You can get hurt that way. Hell, you will get hurt that way. But you'll get hurt trying to hide away in all that silence and leave your life unsung. There's no future without tears. Are you really setting your hopes on not getting hurt at all? You think that's an option? You clearly aren't listening to enough Morrissey songs. ~ Rob Sheffield

An example of naming which can easily prompt out-of-context interpretation is a hypothetical method name like harvest_dead_children(); ~ Anonymous

I want to get a job naming kitchen appliances. That seems easy; refrigerator, toaster, blender. You just say what the thing does and add "er". ~ Mitch Hedberg

Human being" is more a verb than a noun. Each of us is unfinished, a work in progress. Perhaps it would be most accurate to add the word "yet" to all our assessments of ourselves and each other . . . If life is process, all judgments are provisional, we can't judge something until it is finished. No one has won or lost until the race is over . . .

In our instinctive attachments, our fear of change, and our wish for certainty and permanence, we may undercut the impermanence which is our greatest strength, our most fundamental identity. Without impermanence, there is no process. The nature of life is change. All hope is based on process . . .

It is taken me somewhat longer to recognize that a diagnosis is simply another form of judgment. Naming a disease has limited usefulness. It does not capture life or even reflect it accurately. Illness, on the other hand, is a process, like life is.

Much in the concept of diagnosis and cure is about fixing, and the narrow-bore focus on fixing people's problems can lead to denial of the power of their process. Years ago, I took full credit when people became well; their recovery was testimony to my skill and knowledge as a physician. I never recognized that without their biological, emotional, and spiritual process which could respond to my interventions, nothing could have changed at all. All the time I thought I was repairing, I was collaborating. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

I did a load of medicine cabinets a long time ago and I named them after Sex Pistols songs. I suppose I must be getting old if I'm naming work after Philip Larkin poems. ~ Damien Hirst

Naming can satisfy a need, it can shorten a conversation that otherwise might go on for hours. ~ Nihad Sirees

Once when she was just learning to talk, I ran my hand across her face, naming every part of it. Later, when I put her in the crib, she called me back. First, she asked for water, then for milk, then for kisses. "It hurts. Don't go," she said. "What does? What hurts, sweetie?" She paused. "My eyelashes. ~ Jenny Offill

My mother wanted to name me Jackie or Jacqueline but she got to name my sister and my brother, so my dad and my brother insisted on naming me. And they were big fans of 'The Little Mermaid.' ~ Ariel Winter

~self-soothing technique~
Count on Your Senses 5-4-3-2-1

When you have trouble clearing your mind of thoughts of food, try focusing on your senses.
.1. State one scent you can smell.
.2. Name two sounds you can hear.
.3. Describe three sensations your body is feeling, such as temperature, the texture of your sweater, your feet against the ground.
.4. Identify four colors that you see.
.5. To yourself, begin by naming five things you see in front of you.
When you finish doing this, it's like that you will be thinking about nothing, not even food – unless there's food directly in front of you. If you are still thinking about food, repeat each step until you notice that your thoughts are less clouded by food cravings. ~ Susan Albers Psy D

She had something Adam didn't. Curiosity. First step to growth
and if it wasn't for Eve's Adam would still be sitting by the side of the pool picking his nose and scratching his scalp, bamboozled by his own reflection. Off in her part of Eden, Eve hadn't bothered naming the animals. On the other hand she'd discovered how to milk some of them and how best to eat the eggs of others. She'd decided she wasn't overly keen on torrential rain and had built a shelter from bamboo and banana leaves, into which she'd retire when the heavens opened, having set out coconut shells to catch the rainwater with a view to saving herself the schlep down to the spring every time she wanted a drink. The only thing you won't be surprised to hear about is that she'd already domesticated a cat and called it Misty. ~ Glen Duncan

For never has there been, in modern times, such a Homeric world, where so much value is pinned onto the utterance of name! Entire conversations, entire lives, are devoted to the act of naming people, and in Pakistan the affluent would be totally devoid of talk if they were unable to take names in vain. Caste and all its subclassifications are recreated every day in the structure of a conversation that knows which names to name ... ~ Sara Suleri

Better to lose count while naming your blessings than to lose your blessings to counting your troubles. ~ Maltbie Davenport Babcock

For a long time, I have been making many predictions, far in advance, of events since come to pass, naming the particular locality. I acknowledge all to have been accomplished through divine power and inspiration. ~ Nostradamus

I wonder if we name storms because naming is the only power we're left with. ~ Paige Lewis

By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state. Then there are the adjectives: dreadful, heinous, execrable, vile, and so on. They are not so much as descriptive as judgmental. They carry a weight of censure mingled with fear. Is this not a queer state of affairs? It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps words are an attempt to make it be there? Or, again, perhaps there is something, but the words invented it. Such considerations make me feel dizzy, as if a hole had opened briefly in the world. ~ John Banville

Weapons are kept from women, but such a naming suggests that perhaps men fear our talents in war as well as our desire for peace. ~ Alice Hoffman

Several amendments should be made to the primary and general election laws to improve them, but such changes must in no way interfere with a full and free expression of the people's choice in naming the candidates to be voted on at general elections. ~ Arthur Capper

It is unnecessary to spoil your precious involvements with a person with some word. We cannot name and express every human relationship or feeling, and we confine our involvements by naming them. ~ M. T. Panchal

The more one engages in conscious action to understand and transform the world -- one's reality -- through the interplay between reflection and action, the more fully human we become, that is, we have greater control over our destinies. If we just accept the world as set by others, we allow ourselves to become dehumanized -- an object shaped and made by others rather than expressing our uniquely human potential to be involved actively in creating what we become. As human beings, our shared vocation is to become active individual subjects engaged on an equal basis with others in the process of creating (or naming) the world. We should create history and culture rather than exist merely as passive objects accepting reality and the world as ready-made by other people. In creating history and culture, we create our own beings in the process. ~ Marie Emmit

Traditionally, common social location meant that the two partners used the same family name. In recent years alternative patterns of naming have been developed, for reasons which are more convincing to feminists than they are to genealogists or to mail carriers. ~ John Howard Yoder

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. ~ Leon Bambrick

First you must give it a name," said the snake. "Naming a thing takes away some of its power and gives it to you instead. ~ Claire Legrand

Since we were renamed, and now it feels like 80 percent of the African-American population has the name Washington or Jefferson or some president or slave owner's name. And, I almost wonder is this, like, is this part of a way of taking back the principle of naming your - I might be going too far into this - but naming your kids something of your choice? ~ Jordan Peele

A candle is like a small sun, but the sun is like a large candle; examined closely, language turns out to operate through the lateral associations of metaphor, rather than through the vertical identifications of naming. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe. ~ Anne Enright

In naming that which is right before me, that which I'd otherwise miss, the invisible becomes visible. ~ Ann Voskamp

At night, a few lights marked port and starboard of these gargantuan industrial forms, and I filled them with loneliness. I listened to these dark shapes as if they were black spaces in music, a musician learning the silences of a piece. I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence; the moment I looked into the room and took in only what was visible, not vanished. The moment I failed to see Bella had disappeared. But I did not know how to seek by way of silence. So I lived a breath apart, a touch-typist who holds his hands above the keys slightly in the wrong place, the words coming out meaningless, garbled. Bella and I inches apart, the wall between us. I thought of writing poems this way, in code, every letter askew, so that loss would wreck the language, become the language.
If one could isolate that space, that damaged chromosome in words, in an image, then perhaps one could restore order by naming. Otherwise history is a tangle of wires. ~ Anne Michaels

Yes. I think I'll name my next horse Charlotte. She had tits a man could die between."
Teta like to name his horses after special women in his life. I'd noticed how he never mentioned naming a horse after his wife. ~ Hunter Shea

Music is more difficult - try naming a political band. The Dead Kennedys. The Dead Kennedys are political, but they are more funny than they are political. ~ Thom Yorke

I think it's funny. There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they're afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows. Have you practical people ever thought that that's all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex structure, with all your laws and guns - just somebody naming the exact nature of what you're doing? ~ Ayn Rand

My first question is- do you have a name?
"A name? Yes."
"Ah!" said the wolf. It wrote several extensive notes. "And what is that name?"
"George."
"I see," said the wolf. "And how long have you been George?"
"How long? As in, how long have I been alive?"
"oh, were you here in some way before you were alive?" asked the wolf, interested.
"I...don't really know," said George. " I don't think so."
"So you don't know if you were here? Or if you were here before your George-time? Is it possible for you to be here, bu not know it?"
"My what time? no, I mean, I was born, and then they just named me George."
"So you are not George," said the wolf. George is just a name. A word. A propulsion of air modified by the flexing of throat parts."
"Well, I am George, but...yes. Yes, and...no."
"Is it possible that you became George at a later time, having been originally named that thing?" asked the wolf. " What if the naming had been different, would you still be George?"
"I...yes?"
"Really?" breathed the wolf in awe. "This is all so confusing." Yet he seemed very pleased with George's answers. " I don't know how you all do it. It seems so marvelously complex to simply...be. ~ Robert Jackson Bennett

Io, Europa, Ganimedes puer, atque Calisto
lascivo nimium perplacuere Iovi.
(Io, Europa, the boy Ganymede, and Callisto greatly pleased lustful Jupiter.)
[Marius naming Jupiter's moons] ~ Simon Marius

These Outwallers that killed Hector - the Sossag - they were serving a Power of the Wild called Thorn. Aye?"
"Naming calls. But yes." The captain drank.
"So I call him and he comes and I gut him," Tom said. "So? ~ Miles Cameron

If we want to talk about violence as form of illness, a form of dis-ease, that's fine. Let's talk about it. It's just that mental illness, which deals with an individual's struggle with experiences that prevent them from functioning the way they want to function, is exactly the wrong category for such a naming. Rather, violence represents a systemic un-health, an interaction between an individual and larger forces that are harmful, that are in-and-of-themselves violent. Paul called them "the powers and principalities. ~ David Finnegan-Hosey

Tell me we'll be naming our children Beautiful and nothing else. ~ Andrea Gibson

I am not indifferent to the appreciation of kind people. [The voters were] extremely kind in naming me the world's top public intellectual, a title to which I can never see myself as entitled. ~ Fethullah Gulen

We are not responsible for what breaks us, but we can be responsible for what puts us back together again. Naming the hurt is how we begin to repair our broken parts. ~ Desmond Tutu

The Undivided Wholeness of All Things
Most mind-boggling of all are Bohm's fully developed ideas about wholeness. Because everything in the cosmos is made out of the seamless holographic fabric of the implicate order, he believes it is as meaningless to view the universe as composed of "parts, " as it is to view the different geysers in a fountain as separate from the water out of which they flow. An electron is not an "elementary particle. " It is just a name given to a certain aspect of the holomovement. Dividing reality up into parts and then naming those parts is always arbitrary, a product of convention, because subatomic particles, and everything else in the universe, are no more separate from one another than different patterns in an ornate carpet. This is a profound suggestion. In his general theory of relativity Einstein astounded the world when he said that space and time are not separate entities, but are smoothly linked and part of a larger whole he called the space-time continuum. Bohm takes this idea a giant step further. He says that everything in the universe is part of a continuum. Despite the apparent separateness of things at the explicate level, everything is a seamless extension of everything else, and ultimately even the implicate and explicate orders blend into each other. Take a moment to consider this. Look at your hand. Now look at the light streaming from the lamp beside you. And at the dog resting at your feet. You are not merely made of the s ~ Michael Talbot

Another interesting aspect of the gender war that most women forget is that their thoughts and judgments about men impact the way men behave around them. If you believe your thoughts reside exclusively in the privacy of your mind, think again. Your thoughts are palpable and resonate with others. If you judge someone as incompetent, insensitive, or stupid, they feel it. This includes men.
Some people are more skillful at noticing and naming this type of energy, but everyone is affected by it. Whether you like it or not, you have an impact on how people, especially men, behave around you. Your ideas, thoughts, and beliefs about people influence how they treat you. Perception is an act of creation. Thinking all men are generally stupid, untrustworthy, insensitive, or chauvinistic will actually push them to behave in those ways toward you. It's as though you are nudging them in that direction and then get to say, "See! Look - I'm right. All men do suck. ~ Marie Forleo

Vatican's secretly composed message to all of Germany's Catholics. On Palm Sunday, 1937, the letter had been read by every priest, bishop, and cardinal across Germany to their congregations and three hundred thousand copies had been disseminated. Drafted by Munich's Cardinal von Faulhaber and Pope Pius XI, it told German Catholics in carefully veiled terms that National Socialism was an evil religion based on racism that stood contrary to the church's teachings and every man's right to equality. It made reference to "an insane and arrogant prophet" without naming Hitler. ~ Adam Makos