Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

Part of the role of the writer is to encourage other people to discover their voices.

The things that cause you friction are the things from which you might make art. Surely losing is one of the most endemic frictions of our journey.

I think of poets over the ages sending their voices out into the sky, leaving quiet, indelible trails.

On the board was written, "Poetry is a wide-open field." (p183)

Arab culture is full of great story tellers, and it is one of the favorite pastimes of Arab people. I think that there is a deep hunger in the human psyche for story and the nourishment it gives us. People don't live on one level chatter alone, rhetoric or just the conveyance of news. We need the threading and layering of a day that story gives us, and that's very much from the culture.

[He] had a new theory. "Every day, focus on one thing. Think about it, examine it, look at it from different directions, change your mind. Make notes, ask questions, connect it to other things if you want but still... mostly one thing." (p209)

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

I have always thought about how stupid and boring violence seems in this world where we could just listen to more stories instead, right? We could ask people who trouble us, Could you tell me your story? Usually I have found when you ask someone to do that, you end up feeling closer to them, even if their story in no way mirrors yours. Find a better thing to do.

Discovering Something New Every Day was an Al-Amri family motto. Aref's father said people started playing this game the day they were born. (p7)

details have always been the doorway by which we approach and apprehend the larger things of the world, the larger truths, whatever they might be.

I hope you feel as I do that it wouldn't be that hard for the United States to have two friends. You know, to have only one good friend seems like the dark side of junior high school. Every time President Obama or any president says, "Israel, you are our enduring friend forever," I think, Okay that's fine, but couldn't you have two friends? What about, "Palestine, you are our friend too." Why not?

Aref kept thinking that no matter what you say, there is something more inside that you can't say. You talk around it in a circle, like stirring water with a stick, when ripples swirl out from the center. (p. 259)

I think I said this like 40 years ago in a poem — use a single word as an oar that could get you through the days, just by holding a word, thinking about it differently, and seeing how that word rubs against other words, how it interplays with other words. There’s a luxury in that kind of thinking about language and text, but it’s very basic, as well. It’s simple. It’s invisible. It doesn’t cost anything.

Some days were long sentences</br>flowing into one another.

Whenever someone suggests "how much is lost in translation!" I want to say, "Perhaps but how much is gained!" A new world of readers, for one thing.