Naomi Shihab Nye quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Naomi Shihab Nye on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Only in words on a page can it still be yesterday.

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

Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.

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!

In these evenings he sat by our beds weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.

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

But pain and anguish were everywhere anyway. Might as well put them to good use.

Skin had hope, that's what skin does. Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.

You will no longer pick this sage that flavors your whole life.

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

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

why are we so monumentally slow?

Every day is a poetry day.

I was a fool, and I will always be a fool, and there will never, never, be a last day of school.

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

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

I'm still the kid dreaming of the lives she'll never have but guess what? Maybe she doesn't want them.

But I know we need to keep warm here on earth
And when your shawl is as thin as mine is, you tell stories.

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

Sometimes a bus ride was all it took to feel better.

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.

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

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

Those whom we did not know think they know us now.

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

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.

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

What twists or rage greater than we could ever guess had savaged skylines, thousands of lives?

We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.

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

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

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

Are people the only holy land?

Poetry, the most intimate form of expression, gives us a deeper sense of reality than headlines and news stories ever could.

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

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

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

the long sorrow of the color red.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we find poems.

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.

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?

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.

I wondered stony afternoons owning all their vastness.

The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

What would it be like to be a turtle inside a shell hit by hailstones?

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

Most days weren't clear when you were in them.

I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news.

There are people we have never seen who are busy thinking up things we should be worried about.

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

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