Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

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.

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

I don't know if my father can hear me. But it is important to pretend he can./ My sanity rests in that. The man he was can hear the daughter I am.

My father was very disappointed by war and fighting. And he thought language could help us out of cycles of revenge and animosity. And so, as a journalist, he always found himself asking lots of questions and trying to gather information. He was always very clear to underscore the fact that Jewish people and Arab people were brother and sister.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm not interested in
who suffered the most.
I'm interested in
people getting over it.

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?

Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

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.

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

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

Are people the only holy land?

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 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!

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.

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.

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

We all find ourselves involved in projects or activities that confound us-when or why did I say I would do this? What was I thinking? I needed a poem for myself that said-pause longer. Think again.

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

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.

I can never see fashion models,
lean angular cheeks, strutting hips
and blooming hair, without thinking of
the skulls at the catacombs in Lima, Peru.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I never did understand
why the tree was still happy
at the end. The little boy
used her until she was
nothing but a stump.
She couldn't even run away.
But the ending was always the same:
And the tree was happy.

The writing of Kathleen McGookey shines more brightly than most fine things we feel pleasure to read. Celebrate it!

I want to be someone making music/with my coming.

I think whenever you love something or somebody it means that you have to extend yourself, you have to grow - get a little larger. You can't stay in your little comfortable - spot.

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

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

I wondered stony afternoons owning all their vastness.

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

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

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

If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn't realize the teacher was saying, 'Make it shine. It's worth it.' Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It's a new vision of something. It means you don't have to be perfect the first time. What a relief!

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.

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.

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

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.

Being alive is a common road. It's what we notice makes us different.

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.

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.

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

But pain and anguish were everywhere anyway. Might as well put them to good use.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.

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

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?

Peter Conners stunning prose poems are packed with keen sensitivity, dreaminess, and wit. I love his time travels, the vibrant layering of image and detail. Try taking walks as you are reading this book- the dazzle of landscapes, inner and outer, feel replenished and rich. This is language and vision I want to come home to again and again.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes there's no one to listen to what you really might like to say at a certain moment. The paper always listens.

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

the long sorrow of the color red.

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.

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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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Poetry is everything that headline news is not.

Every day is a poetry day.

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

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.

why are we so monumentally slow?

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

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.

Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.