Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Naomi Shihab Nye
123 quotes
“I would like to go to school with the donkeys in the field. To stand all day in the free air with an open mouth. No bells ringing." (p75)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe the hardest thing about moving overseas was being in a place where no one but your own family had any memory of you. It was like putting yourself back together with little pieces. (p80)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Jerusalem so much old anger floated around, echoed from fading graffiti, seeped out of cracks. Sometimes it bumped into new anger in the streets. The air felt stacked with weeping and raging and praying to God by all the different names. (p89)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some people carried anger around for years, in a secret box inside their bodies, and it grew tighter like a hardening knot. The problem with it getting tighter and smaller was that the people did, too, hiding it...But other people responded differently. They let their anger grow so large it ate them up--even their voices and laughter. And still they couldn't get rid of it. They forgot where it had come from. They tried to shake the anger loose, but no one liked them by now. (p89)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you could be anyone,would you choose to be yourself?”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some people let their countries become their religions and that didn't work either. (p174)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“what a pleasure just to say words that felt bigger than you were. (p174)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we were born we were blank pieces of paper; nothing had been written yet.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All our roots go deep down, even if they’re tangled (p199)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For years the word floated in the air around their heads, yellow pollen, wispy secret dust of the ages passed on and on. Habibi, darling, or Habibti, feminine for my darling. (p204)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Did people who committed acts of violence think their victims and their victims' relatives would just forget? Didn't people see? How violence went on and on like a terrible wheel? (p225)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe peace was the size of a teacup. (p226)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you liked somebody, you wanted to trade the best things you knew about. You liked them not only for themselves, but for the parts of you that they brought out. (p255)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was a door in the heart that had no lock on it.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You will need to be brave. There are hard days coming. There are hard words waiting in people’s mouths to be spoken. There are walls. You can’t break them. Just find doors in them." (p258)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: published in Words Under the Words. 1995.
“(What attracted you to poetry?) That was a lifetime, instinctive connection. I loved the ways poetry worked on the page and in our brains. I loved the spaciousness about poetry—the space around the lines and room for your own thinking. I love the variety of voices. (2024)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Palestinians are all haunted. We’re haunted by what used to be, what could have been, what we dream could be, what we would prefer for all the people who are living there right in the heart of it—and have everything at stake. (2024)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel very close to that part of each of us which remains young, idealistic, and curious. (2019)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When people tilt their heads just slightly to imagine another person's experience, the space inside the mind grows. (2019)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am moved by her (Janna Jihad Ayyad) as I have always been moved by the struggle of Palestinian people to maintain any kind of regular normal life under extremely harsh circumstances. (2019)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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! (2014)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (2012)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(BM: So "the fuel that feeds you" is the power of words?) NSN: I think so. The power of words, and a faith in the power of words. That words can give you something back if you trust them, and if you know that you're not trying to proclaim things all the time, but you're trying to discover things. (2002)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“during the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me - after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq - 'You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.' They'll feel closer to that place in a different way. (2002)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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...How do they maintain any shred of dignity and balance? You know those are the courageous people to me. All the-- simple people of the earth who-- don't lose their sanity in the face of-- constant-- disease in the world they live in. Who keep sending their children to school, who keep combing their children's hair. How do they do that? (2002)”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I used to get in trouble a lot when I was a kid in elementary school for, well, what the teacher would call daydreaming. It was daydreaming, but I always felt that it was almost deeper. I remember wanting to respond and say something like, “Well, it’s not just daydreaming. I’m in a hypnotic trance, thinking about the blood inside my body right now, and all the different things it’s doing that I will never see"...that feeling of being transported by the miracle that we’re living inside of it every minute, and we often don’t even think about it.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the reasons I don’t like the phrase “somebody passes away,” it’s so flimsy, it’s so vague, it sounds just like a wisp in the wind. No, they don’t, they die and then they stay in so many ways within us, around us in everything they loved. I just feel very, very strongly about that”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“just today, some students I was talking to in a Skype class in Kuwait — how much I love the modern world, that we can do these things.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that is very important, not feeling separate from text — feeling your thoughts as text or the world as it passes through you as a kind of text; the story that you would be telling to yourself about the street even as you walk down it or as you drive down it; as you look out the window, the story you would be telling. It always seemed very much to me, as a child, that I was living in a poem — that my life was the poem.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think I said this like 40 years ago in a poem — use a single word as an oar that could get you through the days, just by holding a word, thinking about it differently, and seeing how that word rubs against other words, how it interplays with other words. There’s a luxury in that kind of thinking about language and text, but it’s very basic, as well. It’s simple. It’s invisible. It doesn’t cost anything.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The minute you place yourself above, what does that do to others?”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it’s mysterious how these power structures unfold, isn’t it, and how we’re willing to accept them and allow them to prevail without questioning them.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are just so many mysteries about people wanting to presume their pain has more of a reality than someone else’s pain. And I think all the holy persons of all backgrounds and faiths have always called upon us to empathize in a more profound way, to stretch our imaginations to what that other person might be experiencing. And it sounds so basic, but these days, when you listen to the loud voices, you wonder, what’s happened to that? What’s happened to the awareness that we don’t have to be vindictive and continue on in a cycle of revenge and violence?”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That feeling of being connected to someone else, when you allow yourself to be very particular, is another mystery of writing.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can sit down and write three sentences — how long does that take, three minutes, five minutes? — and be giving yourself a very rare gift of listening to yourself, just finding out, when you go back and look at what you wrote. And how many times we think, “Oh, I would never have remembered that if I hadn’t written it down — when and how did that even occur to me? I sort of like it, this week, and it could help me, and now I want to connect it to something else.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People I read a lot to my son were people like Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton, Frank O’Hara for some reason, Chinese poems, Japanese poems.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As readers and writers, we find a certain home in books and language and literature — like I hear a Mary Oliver poem, and it’s as if I’ve been her neighbor, because I’ve read so many of her poems, even though I’ve never spent a day in her town.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cross That Line” is an important poem to me because I loved Paul Robeson so much as a child.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I liked the portable, comfortable shape of poems. I liked the space around them and the way you could hold your words at arm’s length and look at them. And especially the way they took you to a deeper, quieter place, almost immediately.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes while traveling in Mexico or India or any elsewhere, I feel that luminous sense of being invisible as a traveler, having no long, historical ties, simply being a drifting eye…but after awhile, I grow tired of that feeling and want to be somewhere where the trees are my personal friends again.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So how can we continue to help-be tuning forks in some way? I guess that's the job of writers. We're tuning forks. We strike a note and it's not what we sing, so much, just that we strike this note-and then that note resonates in someone else's life, maybe they hear a harmonious note in their own lives.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The person who's vanished is the one you really think about.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've always felt that any little bit of other in our lives - even if its that we grew up on the edge of town and all our friends were on the inside of town-gives much more than it takes away.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“details have always been the doorway by which we approach and apprehend the larger things of the world, the larger truths, whatever they might be.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jerusalem is so permeated with layers and textures, minglings of all kinds that, once you've lived there you don't get over it.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've always felt there was a song right around us all the time. When people are missing that, they need to wake up. They need to find their poetry where they are.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Having a child, for the first time, gave me a sense of being part of history, of what being part of an ongoing human species is like. I saw all people in the world differently. I had different empathy for people's situations, once I became a parent.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source