Top 86 Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes
#1. 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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#2. Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we find poems.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#3. 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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#4. Answer, if you hear the words under the words- otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#5. Apparently people commonly died when their loved ones were out of the room. Bathroom break. Quick trip down to the cafeteria for a grilled cheese. It was easier to die if you didn't have family members to worry about at that exact moment.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#6. I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#7. It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#9. The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world
Naomi Shihab Nye
#10. The person you have known a long tme is embedded in you like a jewel. The person you have just met casts out a few glistening beams & you are fascinated to see more of them. How many more are there? With someone you've barely met the curiosity is intoxicating.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#12. 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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#13. 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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#14. 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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#15. Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#16. There are people we have never seen who are busy thinking up things we should be worried about.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#17. When allowed to return to the class, your feelings of humility and lonesomeness will render you a much finer student and person.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#20. I think whenever you love something or somebody it means that you have to extend yourself, you have to grow - get a little larger. You can't stay in your little comfortable - spot.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#21. I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body
Naomi Shihab Nye
#23. 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
Naomi Shihab Nye
#24. Sometimes there's no one to listen to what you really might like to say at a certain moment. The paper always listens.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#25. The real heroes of race and culture would always be the people who stepped out of their own line to make a larger circle.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#26. Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#27. Getting over what you did to me is not why I get out of bed anymore.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#28. 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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#29. No one lives in these regions
of rock and sun.
It is a lucky part of the world;
to grow old without buildings
and roadways,
to dissolve quietly
without feeling stunned.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#30. 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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#31. I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#32. I was a fool, and I will always be a fool, and there will never, never, be a last day of school.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#34. I'm writing mostly to thank you for living you eighty years and to tell you I love you and think of you often.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#35. I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#37. From "Famous"
I want to be famous the 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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#38. Our limbs which had already traveled far beyond her world, carrying the click of distances in the smooth, untroubled soles of their shoes.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#39. We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else's.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#40. I'm not interested in
who suffered the most.
I'm interested in
people getting over it.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#41. We walked where the ancient pier juts into the sea.
Stood on the rim of the pool, by the circle
of black boulders. No one saw we were there
and everyone who had ever been there
stood silently in air.
Where else do we ever have to go, and why?
Naomi Shihab Nye
#42. Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words
and not one of them can save me.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#44. I never did understand
why the tree was still happy
at the end. The little boy
used her until she was
nothing but a stump.
She couldn't even run away.
But the ending was always the same:
And the tree was happy.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#45. You will no longer pick this sage that flavors your whole life.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#46. But I know we need to keep warm here on earth
And when your shawl is as thin as mine is, you tell stories.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#48. A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#49. There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights you forget you are one of them.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#50. What would it be like to be a turtle inside a shell hit by hailstones?
Naomi Shihab Nye
#52. 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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#54. Let me peer out at the world through your lens. (Maybe I'll shudder, or gasp, or tilt my head in a question.) Let me see how your blue is my turquoise and my orange is your gold. Suddenly binary stars, we have startling gravity. Let's compare scintillation - let's share starlight.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#55. The writing of Kathleen McGookey shines more brightly than most fine things we feel pleasure to read. Celebrate it!
Naomi Shihab Nye
#56. In these evenings he sat by our beds weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#57. But we love you," my parents said. "We love you very much." I know, but they loved me as a girl. The boy within me was stuck with me. Not till much later did I find out that the boy within was really a girl.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#58. 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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#59. But pain and anguish were everywhere anyway. Might as well put them to good use.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#60. Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#61. 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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#62. Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#63. 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
Naomi Shihab Nye
#65. I'm still the kid dreaming of the lives she'll never have but guess what? Maybe she doesn't want them.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#66. I knew what slant of light would make you turn over. It was then I felt the highways slide out of my hands. I remembered the old men in the west side cafe, dealing dominoes like magical charms.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#67. Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#69. Skin had hope, that's what skin does. Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#70. Poetry, the most intimate form of expression, gives us a deeper sense of reality than headlines and news stories ever could.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#71. Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#72. Because Ali did not want to see the deep pools of his kind teacher's eyes and fall into them. He didn't know how to swim.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#73. 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!
Naomi Shihab Nye
#76. 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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#77. What twists or rage greater than we could ever guess had savaged skylines, thousands of lives?
Naomi Shihab Nye
#78. So ask yourself, you swirling tornado of a human being, in a world of disoriented honeybees, do you want to look locked out the minute you sit down?
Naomi Shihab Nye
#79. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#80. Or maybe his reclusiveness was a decisive marketing strategy-if you disappear, people are more interested in your work. You become a legend while you're still alive. Crouching behind a stonewall, or the post under a house ... people are kneeling down to find you.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#81. The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#82. Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#83. 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!
Naomi Shihab Nye
#84. Amal, you look stunned," said Mrs. Melchor. "Have you been struck by lightning between classes?"
"Yes," she said. "The lightning of ignorance."
Mrs. Melchor raised her eyebrows.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#85. I Still Have Everything You Gave Me
It is dusty on the edges.
It is slightly rotten.
I guard it without thinking.
I focus on it once a year
when I shake it out in the wind.
I do not ache.
I would not trade.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#86. Being alive is a common road. It's what we notice makes us different.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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