Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes - Page 2

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

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

Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.

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

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

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

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 like the weather, never really can predict when this rain cloud's gonna burst; when it's the high or it's the low, when you might need a light jacket. Sometimes I'm the slush that sticks to the bottom of your work pants, but I can easily be the melting snowflakes clinging to your long lashes. I know that some people like: sunny and seventy-five, sunny and seventy-five, sunny and seventy-five, but you take me as I am and never forget to pack an umbrella.

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.'

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

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.

Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible. You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known.

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

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!

I do think that all of us think in poems.

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

maybe we try too hard to be remembered, waking to the glowing yellow disc in ignorance, swearing that today will be the day, today we will make something of our lives. what if we are so busy searching for worth that we miss the sapphire sky and cackling blackbird. what else is missing? maybe our steps are too straight and our paths too narrow and not overlapping. maybe when they overlap someone in another country lights a candle, a couple resolves their argument, a young man puts down his silver gun and walks away.

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

We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.

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

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

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

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.

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

why are we so monumentally slow?