Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes
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Sometimes there’s no one to listen to what you really might like to say at a certain moment. The paper always listens.
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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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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.
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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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The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.
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I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body...
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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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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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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, skins and moles and old scars, secret and public hair, crooked toes. I support those who have done nothing large.
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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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Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old.
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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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Being alive is a common road. It's what we notice makes us different.
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I want to be someone making music/with my coming.
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Getting over what you did to me is not why I get out of bed anymore.
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It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.
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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.
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Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out - helping OTHERS move inward - it is an honor to be with others in the spirit of writing and encouragement.