Quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye

About Naomi Shihab Nye:

Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet, songwriter, and novelist. She was born to a Palestinian father and American mother. Although she regards herself as a "wandering poet", she refers to San Antonio as her home. She says a visit to her grandmother in the village of Sinjil was a life-changing experience. She was the recipient of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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 laughe...

Naomi Shihab Nye

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.

Naomi Shihab Nye

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.

Naomi Shihab Nye

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...

Naomi Shihab Nye

you will never catch up. Walk around feeling like a leaf know you could tumble at any second. Then decide what to do with your time. --The Art of Disappearing

Naomi Shihab Nye

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

Naomi Shihab Nye

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 childre...

Naomi Shihab Nye

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 m...

Naomi Shihab Nye

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 scintil...

Naomi Shihab Nye

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

Naomi Shihab Nye

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 s...

Naomi Shihab Nye

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! ...

Naomi Shihab Nye

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!

Naomi Shihab Nye

I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.

Naomi Shihab Nye

I do think that all of us think in poems.

Naomi Shihab Nye

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

Naomi Shihab Nye

The person you have known a long tme is embedded in you like a jewel. The person you have just met casts out a few glistening beams & you are fascinated to see more of them. How many more are there? With someone you've barely met the curiosity is int...

Naomi Shihab Nye

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.

Naomi Shihab Nye

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 - th...

Naomi Shihab Nye

You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Author Bio

  • NameNaomi Shihab Nye
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornMarch 12, 1952
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship