Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

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.

If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn't realize the teacher was saying, 'Make it shine. It's worth it.' Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It's a new vision of something. It means you don't have to be perfect the first time. What a relief!

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell you a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.

The hands are churches that worship the world.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have always loved the gaps, the spaces between things, as much as the things. I love staring, pondering, mulling, puttering. I love the times when someone or something is late-there's that rich possibility of noticing more, in the meantimePoetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.