Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

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 would strongly suggest that bicultural families such as mine teach their children both languages from the beginning if they can.

A fundamentalist mind doesn't entertain anything. It latches on, clutches on, to something, and says Only this! That pretty well eliminates metaphor...And fanatics don't ask the questions, and to me that's always been the most critical creative act. It's to ask questions, period. And fundamentalist minds don't. I guess they think they have the answers and so they don't have to ask any more questions. And so I don't trust them. (Maybe the fundamentalist doesn't have the strength for questions.) Maybe not. Or the stretch. The idea that you could stretch and come back to your own shape. That's threatening. And that's one thing that poetry can really give us - the sense of the stretch. That we can always stretch-poems help us feel that about our experiences. Fluent and fluid.

Writing...helps us identify what makes the whole geography of our lives.

I don't understand how people can disconnect politics from daily life, because that's how politics count. We're daily life people and that's where politics become a reality to us.

Think of all the towns and cities
we've never seen or imagined.

Some people carried anger around for years, in a secret box inside their bodies, and it grew tighter like a hardening knot. The problem with it getting tighter and smaller was that the people did, too, hiding it...But other people responded differently. They let their anger grow so large it ate them up--even their voices and laughter. And still they couldn't get rid of it. They forgot where it had come from. They tried to shake the anger loose, but no one liked them by now. (p89)

"Poetry is like language soup, the taste of different flavors. Sometimes you just like the way a word sounds, pressed up against another word." She said poetry was contagious. In a good way. (p184)

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?

For years the word floated in the air around their heads, yellow pollen, wispy secret dust of the ages passed on and on. Habibi, darling, or Habibti, feminine for my darling. (p204)

Each thing gives us something else...The more any of us writes, the more our words will "come to us." If we trust in the words and their own mysterious relationships with one another, they will help us find things out.

(And if you could choose something to carry you through, say, the next forty or so years, what would that be?) It's already been given to me. Listening and passing it on! I'm not one of those people who walks around all the time trying to feel worthy of all my life's gifts, although I know people like that and respect them. They're always asking Do I deserve this life I've been given?—I just don't think in those terms. Pass on something good and you'll deserve it. You don't have to be perfect. When I was turning forty, a few years ago, I thought a lot about energy. That was the issue, not age. Not all the dumb things that people want to focus on. To have a kind of vital sense of voice and story, life and word, the essential ongoing energy-I hope to keep inviting it in and not to be one of those people who goes to parties and talks about all the writing grants you've never gotten. Not to turn into one of those petulant, whiny writers. To maintain an energy and openness to what comes my way. That would be what I would hope for.

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.

Palestinians are all haunted. We’re haunted by what used to be, what could have been, what we dream could be, what we would prefer for all the people who are living there right in the heart of it—and have everything at stake. (2024)

Think of it: two peoples, so closely related it's hard to tell them apart in the streets sometimes, claiming the same land. The end of the twentieth century.