Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.

There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights you forget you are one of them.

... the real heroes of race and culture would always be the people who stepped out of their own line to make a larger circle.

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.

This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.

only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

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

Sometimes there’s no one to listen to what you really might like to say at a certain moment. The paper always listens.

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.

Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.

When allowed to return to the class, your feelings of humility and lonesomeness will render you a much finer student and person.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

I keep thinking, we teach children to use language to solve their disputes. We teach them not to hit and fight and bite. Then look what adults do!

It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.

Being alive is a common road. It's what we notice makes us different.

The hands are churches that worship the world.

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.

Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.

I say yes when I mean no and the wrinkle grows.

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.

Read, Read, and then Read some more. Always Read. Find the voices that speak most to YOU. This is your pleasure and blessing, as well as responsibility!

I'm writing mostly to thank you for living you eighty years and to tell you I love you and think of you often.

Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.

Getting over what you did to me is not why I get out of bed anymore.

A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.

you will never catch up. Walk around feeling like a leaf know you could tumble at any second. Then decide what to do with your time. --The Art of Disappearing

I'm not interested in who suffered the most. I'm interested in people getting over it.

We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else's.

our limbs which had already traveled far beyond her world, carrying the click of distances in the smooth, untroubled soles of their shoes.

I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.

I want to be someone making music/with my coming.

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.

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.

I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body.

The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.

why are we so monumentally slow?

We all find ourselves involved in projects or activities that confound us-when or why did I say I would do this? What was I thinking? I needed a poem for myself that said-pause longer. Think again.

The writing of Kathleen McGookey shines more brightly than most fine things we feel pleasure to read. Celebrate it!

Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old.

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.

I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body, skins and moles and old scars, secret and public hair, crooked toes. I support those who have done nothing large.

We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.

I do think that all of us think in poems.

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of wordsand not one of them can save me.

only kindness that raises its headfrom the crowd of the world to sayit is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywherelike a shadow or a friend.