Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes
-
We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else's.
→ -
There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights you forget you are one of them.
→ -
The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.
→ -
It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.
→ -
During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me - after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq - 'You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.'
→ -
Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.
→ -
like our parents always told us not to like firefighters warn against we're playing games and making the rules up as we go we're matching warmth to warmth starting fires burning wishes into our skin we're hidden holding forbidden lights we're children whose fathers have never taught never touch but we're finding these new flames we smother at the sound of footsteps.
→ -
What did exclusivity ever have to offer but a distorted, unrealistic view of the world? People who stuck only to their own kind were scared people.
→ -
You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.
→ -
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
→ -
Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out - helping OTHERS move inward - it is an honor to be with others in the spirit of writing and encouragement.
→ -
Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.
→ -
I want to be someone making music/with my coming.
→ -
If someday, in a morning, you see you, in a mirror or the dent of a spoon, and wonder Where is my soul and Where has it gone, remember this: Catch the gaze of a woman on the metro, subway, tram. Look at a man. Seek and you will find you in the silvered space, a flash between souls.
→ -
My mother used to tell me when I went somewhere, "Please leave your foolishness at home." But how could I do that? It was stuck on me.
→ -
Today you will say things you can predict and other things you could never imagine this minute. Don't reject them, let them come through when they're ready, don't think you can plan it al out. This day will never, no matter how long you live, happen again. It is exquisitely singular. It will never again be exactly repeated.
→ -
our limbs which had already traveled far beyond her world, carrying the click of distances in the smooth, untroubled soles of their shoes.
→ -
Mystery: Everything felt better before you got there than when you actually got there. When you actually got there, you didn't quite have the energy to be there.
→ -
It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.
→ -
Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.
→ -
Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.
→ -
I can never see fashion models, lean angular cheeks, strutting hips and blooming hair, without thinking of the skulls at the catacombs in Lima, Peru.
→ -
Where we live in the world is never one place. Our hearts, those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us moons before we are ready for them.
→ -
Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old.
→ -
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
→ -
maybe we try too hard to be remembered, waking to the glowing yellow disc in ignorance, swearing that today will be the day, today we will make something of our lives. what if we are so busy searching for worth that we miss the sapphire sky and cackling blackbird. what else is missing? maybe our steps are too straight and our paths too narrow and not overlapping. maybe when they overlap someone in another country lights a candle, a couple resolves their argument, a young man puts down his silver gun and walks away.
→ -
I am looking for the human who admits his flaws Who shocks the adversary By being kinder not stronger What would that be like? We don't even know
→ -
I'm like the weather, never really can predict when this rain cloud's gonna burst; when it's the high or it's the low, when you might need a light jacket. Sometimes I'm the slush that sticks to the bottom of your work pants, but I can easily be the melting snowflakes clinging to your long lashes. I know that some people like: sunny and seventy-five, sunny and seventy-five, sunny and seventy-five, but you take me as I am and never forget to pack an umbrella.
→ -
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.
→ -
Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.
→