The Naming Song Quotes

“Monsters always return to the people who made them.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“Like monsters,” he agreed, “but born from memory rather than careless whim or deliberate malice.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“But our ghosts are stubborn things.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“Ghosts are the dreams we make of ourselves while we live,” he said. “When we stop being alive, that’s when the dream gets out.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“With each new story, the talk on the train was of what would happen next, and whether something like Buckle could happen again. When the others spoke of it, the courier listened but looked away, because she knew they”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“Then, years later still, the courier Glove—on assignment and asleep—delivered dream. Only then did the named understand that sleep had been a border word: a border between us and the place the monsters came from. Some believed that if sleep and dream had been delivered before Moon delivered monster, then monsters would have remained always on the other side of sleep.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“You are a puzzle,” Beryl said into the courier’s ear, speaking the word as though it were the finest word they had. And when Beryl said it, the courier thought that maybe it was.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“He studied ghosts there—the ghosts of mice and rabbits when he could catch them, the ghosts of people when they weren’t needed in the fields. He also studied the things that escaped from her dreams at night. And sometimes he studied her.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“After something fell from the something tree,” she said, which was the closest anyone could get to saying what had happened to make the old words go away.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“The old words were gone forever.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“Book had delivered official and ongoing. He had delivered perhaps and however, gossip and cajole and grudge, seethe and indulge and dissolute. But of all the words Book had delivered, he was most proud of shadow. “We didn’t think of shadows as separate from the things that made them,” he said. “We hardly even noticed they were there. The nameless still hide in shadows, but it was worse when shadows weren’t shadow, just places where the light didn’t reach, and no one knew to look for them.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“Moon, the second namer, who divined and delivered ghost and who brought upon the committee its great shame, had written: We do not belong to the world we name. We are only the words we deliver, and then we are not even those.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“The people who lived in the village had a saying: In Light, even the dark feels at home.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“From charts discovered on walls of structures built before the Silence, the named knew that the year was divided into twelve parts. It was the courier Glove who had delivered month and then, in his later years, names for most of those months. He had needed no diviner because he named the months for named things, as towns and people were named. Under, Ink, Copse, Cloud … But each time he named a month, he found it harder to deliver a name for the next. Now Glove was over one hundred years a ghost, and still the month between Axe and Stone eluded the committee. The named called it After Axe, but that was not its name. These were dangerous weeks, a span of time that made the nameless bold.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“because words were a better defense against those for whom the watchers watched than all their guns and palisades.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“She lay face-up in water and let her legs dangle. She listened to her own breathing. She had done this as a child, in the pond behind the cottage where her father had studied ghosts and nameless things.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“A daughter of the maps committee chair had run off and taken up residence in the nameless quarters of Hollow, among the thieves and poets whose stray dreams slipped from open windows to wander the streets.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“Juniper had no ghosts to work her land. Out in the fields, the courier walked behind, feeling the softness of the broken soil under her boots. She took an unbroken clod in her hand and broke it. She spoke the word for the thing the farmer had built, harrow.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“It was a new thing, or a thing from before that was back again, which was probably more dangerous.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“The watchers were happy to have a word for those people. Easier to catch them that way.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song