Naomi Shihab Nye quotes

My father was very disappointed by war and fighting. And he thought language could help us out of cycles of revenge and animosity. And so, as a journalist, he always found himself asking lots of questions and trying to gather information. He was always very clear to underscore the fact that Jewish people and Arab people were brother and sister. (Naomi Shihab Nye)

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

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

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.'

Naomi Shihab Nye

I do think that all of us think in poems.

Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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.

Naomi Shihab Nye

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

Naomi Shihab Nye

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

Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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)

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

Naomi Shihab Nye

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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

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

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

Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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