Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The Rider 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.

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

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

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.

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

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we find poems.

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.

We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.

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.

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

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 want to be someone making music/with my coming.

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

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

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.

What would it be like to be a turtle inside a shell hit by hailstones?

Most days weren't clear when you were in them.

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

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.

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

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.

Every day is a poetry day.

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

The days are nouns: touch them The hands are churches that worship the world

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.

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.

I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body

The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.

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. Easier for the one who was dying, maybe.

Sometimes a bus ride was all it took to feel better.

I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news.

I have slept so many times you might think I would really be awake by now

You're just setting yourself up for pain and anguish if you do something like that." But pain and anguish were everywhere anyway. Might as well put them to good use.

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.

those whom we did not know think they know us now.

Answer, if you hear the words under the words- otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.

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.

If you could be anyone, would you choose to be yourself?

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.

I wondered stony afternoons owning all their vastness.

In these evenings he sat by our beds weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.

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

Are people the only holy land?

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.

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?

like our parents always told us not to like firefighters warn against we're playing games and making the rules up as we go we're matching warmth to warmth starting fires burning wishes into our skin we're hidden holding forbidden lights we're children whose fathers have never taught never touch but we're finding these new flames we smother at the sound of footsteps.

When they invite you to the party Remember what parties are like Before answering.

I’m still the kid dreaming of the lives she’ll never have but guess what? Maybe she doesn’t want them.

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?

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.

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.

the years go by, we find our doors and windows. Some are always open, some never were.

Maybe we should just wander around other countries carrying books.

I’m the sea, I’m not afraid of the storm. The sea’s dream is always turbulence. If I don’t have waves and storms, I won’t be the sea anymore. I’ll be the pond— and stinking.

Only in words on a page can it still be yesterday.

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

our limbs which had already traveled far beyond her world, carrying the click of distances in the smooth, untroubled soles of their shoes.

why are we so monumentally slow?

the long sorrow of the color red.

You will no longer pick this sage that flavors your whole life.

what twists or rage greater than we could ever guess had savaged skylines, thousands of lives?

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.

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

You Have to Be Very Careful” You have to be careful telling things. Some ears are tunnels. Your words will go in and get lost in the dark. Some ears are flat pans like the miners used looking for gold. What you say will be washed out with the stones. You look for a long time till you find the right ears. Till then, there are birds and lamps to be spoken to, a patient cloth rubbing shine in circles, and the slow, gradually growing possibility that when you find such ears they already know.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Or maybe his reclusiveness was a decisive marketing strategy-if you disappear, people are more interested in your work. You become a legend while you're still alive. Crouching behind a stonewall, or the post under a house...people are kneeling down to find you.

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

It is difficult to predict what our finest moments will be, but we know when they happen.

He’s mourning his son, number 3000 American dead in Iraq, but as far as he can feel, the worst one.

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.

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.

Fresh as a new notebook — that's how anyone wanted to live. Hopeful as a pencil sharpened, clear as one beam of light landing on the table's far side.

Maybe it’s our duty to be shaped a hundred times by the same stories. We think we’re telling them but really they’re keeping us alive,

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.

To forgive ourselves for what we didn't do Replay a scene over and over in mind Change it change Apologizing to our own story handful of soil I could have planted something better here To walk without remembering another walk To wash off the hoped of a darkened day Make a new one

All our roots go deep down, even if they’re tangled

Grief is an ambush. You’re walking along feeling fine, look down, see a leaf, and begin to weep. —Jack

Each morning he begs his parents not to read the newspaper, knowing how their faces go half-blank and mad,

Work on what you love, your needs will be met.   No

From "Why I could not accept your invitation" Forgive me. Culture is everything right now. But I cannot pretend a scrap of investment in the language that allows human beings to kill one another systematically, abstractly, distantly. The language wrapped around 37,000, or whatever the number is today, dead and beautiful bodies thrown into holes without any tiny, reasonable goodbye.

This is one of the many things Americans don’t understand about Iraq. Kill a member of the tribe, the whole tribe now hates you. How could they not? The Americans think they hate you today, thank you tomorrow.

Red Brocade" The Arabs used to say, When a stranger appears at your door, feed him for three days before asking who he is, where he’s come from, where he’s headed. That way, he’ll have strength enough to answer. Or, by then you’ll be such good friends you don’t care. Let’s go back to that. Rice? Pine nuts? Here, take the red brocade pillow. My child will serve water to your horse. No, I was not busy when you came! I was not preparing to be busy. That’s the armor everyone put on to pretend they had a purpose in the world. I refuse to be claimed. Your plate is waiting. We will snip fresh mint into your tea.