Quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye

“No one lives in these regionsof rock and sun. It is a lucky part of the world; to grow old without buildings and roadways, to dissolve quietly without feeling stunned.”

“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...”

“Anyone who says, Heres my address,write me a poem, deserves something in reply.So Ill tell a secret instead:poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,they are sleeping. They are the shadowsdrifting a...”

“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 ...”

“you will never catch up.Walk around feeling like a leafknow you could tumble at any second.Then decide what to do with your time.--The Art of Disappearing”

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

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

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

“Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of wordsand not one of them can save me.”

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

“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 su...”

“Let me peer out at the worldthrough your lens. (Maybe I'll shudder,or gasp, or tilt my head in a question.)Let me see how your blueis my turquoise and my orangeis your gold. Suddenly binarystars, w...”

“only kindness that raises its headfrom the crowd of the world to sayit is I you have been looking for,and then goes with you everywherelike a shadow or a friend.”

“like our parents alwaystold us not to likefirefighters warn againstwe're playinggames and makingthe rules upas we go we'rematchingwarmth to warmthstarting fires burningwishes into ourskin we're hid...”

“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.”

“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 t...”

“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 qu...”

“Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.So I’ll tell a secret instead:poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,they are sleeping. They are the shadowsdrifti...”

“No one lives in these regionsof rock and sun. It is a lucky part of the world; to grow old without buildings and roadways, to dissolve quietly without feeling stunned.”

“I keep feeling so much gratitude for what we are given in our lives. All of us, by way of accident, by way of things we couldn't have selected ourselves. The worlds we are born into, the people we ...”