Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

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

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

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.

Tear gas canisters scattered in the fields by Israeli soldiers say, "Made in Pennsylvania."...I keep thinking of those signs in the United States at construction sites: YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK HERE.

This is what I want a book of poems and paintings to be-a surprising spring waking us from our daily sleep. A feast of little dishes. An unexpected walk along the rim of a majestic city. Ahlan Wa Sahlan-You are all welcome!

I can't stop believing human beings everywhere hunger for deeper-than-headline news about one another. Poetry and art are some of the best ways this heartfelt "news" may be exchanged.

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.

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.

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!

I kept thinking, as did millions of other people, what can we do? Writers, believers in words, could not give up words when the going got rough. I found myself, as millions did, turning to poetry. But many of us have always turned to poetry. 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.

Sometimes it works to fight logic with logic and craziness with craziness. This truth, however, cannot be depended on.

Suheila commented that people argued most where there was least to talk about. If conversation was rich and subjects many, talk kept rolling fluidly, passing over rough spots like water over rocks. But once everything had been said, you started paddling backwards, flinging water and scraping your knees.

Here at home, the night belonged to the moon. Electricity was rationed, three hours each evening.

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 all out...

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.