Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

“Cross That Line” is an important poem to me because I loved Paul Robeson so much as a child.

As readers and writers, we find a certain home in books and language and literature — like I hear a Mary Oliver poem, and it’s as if I’ve been her neighbor, because I’ve read so many of her poems, even though I’ve never spent a day in her town.

I think many times the way immigrants — people look at immigrants with such a sense of diminishment, as if this person is less than I am because they’ve left their country. Well, I actually think they’re more than we are, because they’re braver. They’ve gone some other place. They have to operate in another language. How easy would that be? If I had to go to China today and start living in China and doing everything in Chinese, it would be very, very hard. So you think about the bravery of these people and the desperation with which they’re trying to find a realm of safety for their families and — just the basic safeties that we take for granted, every day we get up. And I don’t know; I don’t know how a world with so many resources and so many religious traditions and good hopes — how we can keep doing these things to one another in the world that create refugee populations. It just seems outrageous. Why is that happening so much?

People I read a lot to my son were people like Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton, Frank O’Hara for some reason, Chinese poems, Japanese poems.

You can sit down and write three sentences — how long does that take, three minutes, five minutes? — and be giving yourself a very rare gift of listening to yourself, just finding out, when you go back and look at what you wrote. And how many times we think, “Oh, I would never have remembered that if I hadn’t written it down — when and how did that even occur to me? I sort of like it, this week, and it could help me, and now I want to connect it to something else.”

That feeling of being connected to someone else, when you allow yourself to be very particular, is another mystery of writing.

There are just so many mysteries about people wanting to presume their pain has more of a reality than someone else’s pain. And I think all the holy persons of all backgrounds and faiths have always called upon us to empathize in a more profound way, to stretch our imaginations to what that other person might be experiencing. And it sounds so basic, but these days, when you listen to the loud voices, you wonder, what’s happened to that? What’s happened to the awareness that we don’t have to be vindictive and continue on in a cycle of revenge and violence?

something I’ve started saying over the past few years that helped me think about it is — I have so many Jewish friends, both in the United States and other countries, who would agree with this — but the idea that there could not be a sort of alliance between big power countries like the United States and Israel/Palestine that was more equivalent: Why do you have to have only one friend in the region? That’s like the dark side of junior high. In junior high, you learned that you could probably have two friends that are not exactly alike, and you might survive, and in fact, you’d be a much more interesting person. Why couldn’t the United States have two friends? Why couldn’t they ask better questions?

it’s mysterious how these power structures unfold, isn’t it, and how we’re willing to accept them and allow them to prevail without questioning them.

The minute you place yourself above, what does that do to others?

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.

I think that is very important, not feeling separate from text — feeling your thoughts as text or the world as it passes through you as a kind of text; the story that you would be telling to yourself about the street even as you walk down it or as you drive down it; as you look out the window, the story you would be telling. It always seemed very much to me, as a child, that I was living in a poem — that my life was the poem.

just today, some students I was talking to in a Skype class in Kuwait — how much I love the modern world, that we can do these things.

One of the reasons I don’t like the phrase “somebody passes away,” it’s so flimsy, it’s so vague, it sounds just like a wisp in the wind. No, they don’t, they die and then they stay in so many ways within us, around us in everything they loved. I just feel very, very strongly about that

I’ve always been very cognizant of voices in the air, although I don’t usually hear them as distinctly as I did with the “Kindness” poem, but without a doubt, I carry my father’s and I hear him all the time. For poets, I carry W.S. Merwin and William Stafford. Those were two of my favorite poets from my teenage years, whose voices live in me forever. I am such a grateful reader of their work. I had no idea that I would become personal friends with both of them. I feel very lucky to have known them. Also, so many women like Lucille Clifton, whom I valued her voice and her strength and her counsel, her mighty spirit. I feel like her voice is with me always. My Palestinian grandmother is with me, and even though we didn’t speak the same language, I feel that her perspective is with me. Those would be some of my main voices that I regularly listen to.