Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes
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The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.
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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.
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I'm writing mostly to thank you for living you eighty years and to tell you I love you and think of you often.
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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.
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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.
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When allowed to return to the class, your feelings of humility and lonesomeness will render you a much finer student and person.
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... the real heroes of race and culture would always be the people who stepped out of their own line to make a larger circle.
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I'm not interested in who suffered the most. I'm interested in people getting over it.
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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.
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Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old.
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We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.
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I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body...
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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.
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I want to be someone making music/with my coming.
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I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body, skins and moles and old scars, secret and public hair, crooked toes. I support those who have done nothing large.
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Getting over what you did to me is not why I get out of bed anymore.
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Being alive is a common road. It's what we notice makes us different.
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It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.
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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.
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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.