Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes & Sayings

I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body — Naomi Shihab Nye

In these evenings he sat by our beds weaving folktales like vivid little scarves. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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

Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old. — Naomi Shihab Nye

I never did understand
why the tree was still happy
at the end. The little boy
used her until she was
nothing but a stump.
She couldn't even run away.
But the ending was always the same:
And the tree was happy. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

For you who came so far; for you who held out, wearing a black scarf to signify grief; for you who believe true love can find you amidst this atlas of tears linking one town to its own memory of mortar, when it was still a dream to be built and people moved there, believing, and someone with sky and birds in his heart said this would be a good place for a park. — 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

Amal, you look stunned," said Mrs. Melchor. "Have you been struck by lightning between classes?"
"Yes," she said. "The lightning of ignorance."
Mrs. Melchor raised her eyebrows. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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? — Naomi Shihab Nye

I'm writing mostly to thank you for living you eighty years and to tell you I love you and think of you often. — 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

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

Making a Fist
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern
past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand. — Naomi Shihab Nye

The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

Remembering your mistakes more acutely than any minor success. This was the worst. The things that kept you up at night. Tip a waiter that was too small. The words that didn't fit the moment. Words that didn't come till to late. You could kill yourself in increments, punishing your spirit day after day-regret. Guilt. Not the guilt of the little girl who woke in the night embarrassed God was mad at her because she had ticked balls under her shirt, pretending to have breasts. "I even felt sexy." That was sweet, and pure, no crime at all. But the crime of obsessive replay-get rid of it, get rid of it. Who could ever have known that hardest punishments would be the ones you gave yourself? — Naomi Shihab Nye

No one lives in these regions
of rock and sun.
It is a lucky part of the world;
to grow old without buildings
and roadways,
to dissolve quietly
without feeling stunned. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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. — Naomi Shihab Nye

I can never see fashion models,
lean angular cheeks, strutting hips
and blooming hair, without thinking of
the skulls at the catacombs in Lima, Peru. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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. — Naomi Shihab Nye

We start out as little bits of disconnected dust. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Every day is a poetry day. — Naomi Shihab Nye

What would it be like to be a turtle inside a shell hit by hailstones? — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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

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

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

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 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. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Are people the only holy land? — Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me if he roller-skated fast enough his loneliness couldn't catch up to him, the best reason I ever heard for trying to be a champion. What I wonder tonight pedaling hard down King William Street is if it translates to bicycles. A victory! To leave your loneliness panting behind you on some street corner while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas, pink petals that have never felt loneliness, no matter how slowly they fell. — 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

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

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. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we find poems. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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! — Naomi Shihab Nye

But we love you," my parents said. "We love you very much." I know, but they loved me as a girl. The boy within me was stuck with me. Not till much later did I find out that the boy within was really a girl. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Most days weren't clear when you were in them. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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

This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy. — 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 think whenever you love something or somebody it means that you have to extend yourself, you have to grow - get a little larger. You can't stay in your little comfortable - spot. — 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

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

Mystery: Everything felt better before you got there than when you actually got there. When you actually got there, you didn't quite have the energy to be there. — Naomi Shihab Nye

I say yes when I mean no
and the wrinkle grows. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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! — Naomi Shihab Nye

Boy and Egg
Every few minutes, he wants
to march the trail of flattened rye grass
back to the house of muttering
hens. He too could make
a bed in hay. Yesterday the egg so fresh
it felt hot in his hand and he pressed it
to his ear while the other children
laughed and ran with a ball, leaving him,
so little yet, too forgetful in games,
ready to cry if the ball brushed him,
riveted to the secret of birds
caught up inside his fist,
not ready to give it over
to the refrigerator
or the rest of the day. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

Why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Only in words on a page can it still be yesterday. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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

We all find ourselves involved in projects or activities that confound us-when or why did I say I would do this? What was I thinking? I needed a poem for myself that said-pause longer. Think again. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

From "Famous"
I want to be famous the 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

I wondered stony afternoons owning all their vastness. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Sometimes a bus ride was all it took to feel better. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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

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

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. — Naomi Shihab Nye

I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. — Naomi Shihab Nye

The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

I'm not interested in
who suffered the most.
I'm interested in
people getting over it. — Naomi Shihab Nye

To know the difference,
you must run this mountain without pause. In the evening or the afternoon, you must cross the first fields waking
to your footsteps, stormwashed at the foothills.
In the evening or the afternoon, in the closing of a shadowline, you must read aloud the reddened last words of this canyon's leaves to the trees that clap their hands. — Naomi Shihab Nye

We walked where the ancient pier juts into the sea.
Stood on the rim of the pool, by the circle
of black boulders. No one saw we were there
and everyone who had ever been there
stood silently in air.
Where else do we ever have to go, and why? — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

You will no longer pick this sage that flavors your whole life. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out - helping OTHERS move inward - it is an honor to be with others in the spirit of writing and encouragement. — Naomi Shihab Nye

I want to be someone making music/with my coming. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

why are we so monumentally slow? — Naomi Shihab Nye

A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,"
my father would say. And he'd prove it,
cupping the buzzer instantly
while the host with the swatter stared.
In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.
True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.
I changed these to fit the occasion.
Years before, a girl knocked,
wanted to see the Arab.
I said we didn't have one.
After that, my father told me who he was,
"Shihab" - "shooting star"
a good name, borrowed from the sky.
Once I said, "When we die, we give it back?"
He said that's what a true Arab would say. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Apparently people commonly died when their loved ones were out of the room. Bathroom break. Quick trip down to the cafeteria for a grilled cheese. It was easier to die if you didn't have family members to worry about at that exact moment. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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. — Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you? say no.
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.
If they say we should get together.
say why? It's not that you don't love them any more.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees.
The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished. When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time. — Naomi Shihab Nye

the long sorrow of the color red. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Those whom we did not know think they know us now. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories. — Naomi Shihab Nye

I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that -- if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that's a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise, you just feel assaulted by all of the tragedy in the world. — Naomi Shihab Nye

I knew what slant of light would make you turn over. It was then I felt the highways slide out of my hands. I remembered the old men in the west side cafe, dealing dominoes like magical charms.
— Naomi Shihab Nye

Peter Conners stunning prose poems are packed with keen sensitivity, dreaminess, and wit. I love his time travels, the vibrant layering of image and detail. Try taking walks as you are reading this book- the dazzle of landscapes, inner and outer, feel replenished and rich. This is language and vision I want to come home to again and again. — Naomi Shihab Nye