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Naomi Shihab Nye

123 quotes

“Especially when you write, I think, you become cognizant of the little threads carrying us along everywhere, tying us together and linking us up.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We always heard when we were little that to read a poem we needed to read it slowly and we needed to read it more than once and to write a poem you had to pay close attention, write it slowly. And I think we have to live that way. We really do. There's a Thai proverb Life is so short, we must move very slowly. And I think that the word busy-ness finally just has to go. Busy-ness has to go.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I always took writing as being a way of thinking.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writing...helps us identify what makes the whole geography of our lives.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has become very clear to me over the years that Americans, especially young Americans, need to be encouraged to listen to voices from elsewhere. Some of us grow up with the mistaken idea that ours is the only reading and writing culture, and that we are the only literary people in the world. Of course, the United Stated has one of the shortest literary histories in the world, so we need to be reminding children and students to be alert for voices from elsewhere”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“if you read the poems of someone somewhere you know a lot more about that country than you know if you just study its crops or weather conditions.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't understand how people can disconnect politics from daily life, because that's how politics count. We're daily life people and that's where politics become a reality to us.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Arab culture is full of great story tellers, and it is one of the favorite pastimes of Arab people. I think that there is a deep hunger in the human psyche for story and the nourishment it gives us. People don't live on one level chatter alone, rhetoric or just the conveyance of news. We need the threading and layering of a day that story gives us, and that's very much from the culture.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would strongly suggest that bicultural families such as mine teach their children both languages from the beginning if they can.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Salma Khadra al-Jayusi has been instrumental in her role as a transmitter of Arabic literature.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Language is its own music.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've always thought of song writing and poem writing as cousins.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Part of the role of the writer is to encourage other people to discover their voices.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think people who work on translation projects think that they're somehow peace negotiators because the belief is that we'll never stop killing one another until we understand and see one another as human beings. I think that's true. That's why it is very important to me to receive responses to poems like that from Israeli or Jewish poets; they're even more important than responses from Arab poets. When I get responses from an Israeli Jewish poet saying "I'm listening, I'm sorry, I don't like this either," that matters to me a lot.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I kept thinking, as did millions of other people, what can we do? Writers, believers in words, could not give up words when the going got rough. I found myself, as millions did, turning to poetry. But many of us have always turned to poetry. 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.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: from the introduction to 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002)
“if you are a person in the habit of listening to yourself, to others, and then to your memory, then you may be more likely to hear other incredible things like a tree talk to you when you need a tree to talk to you, or the future give you a little bit of a direction. Maybe even you will hear a voice from your past giving you some guidance that you need right at that moment when you need it. I have felt that happen many times. I’m sure that it’s common that you suddenly hear the voice of your teacher from long ago. You haven’t even thought of that person in years, or seen them in many years, and suddenly, you hear something they used to suggest to their class and it comes back to you right when you needed it. There’s so much interesting listening that we can do. I think that kind of listening, it’s here to serve us, but also, we have to be ready for it.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve always been very cognizant of voices in the air, although I don’t usually hear them as distinctly as I did with the “Kindness” poem, but without a doubt, I carry my father’s and I hear him all the time. For poets, I carry W.S. Merwin and William Stafford. Those were two of my favorite poets from my teenage years, whose voices live in me forever. I am such a grateful reader of their work. I had no idea that I would become personal friends with both of them. I feel very lucky to have known them. Also, so many women like Lucille Clifton, whom I valued her voice and her strength and her counsel, her mighty spirit. I feel like her voice is with me always. My Palestinian grandmother is with me, and even though we didn’t speak the same language, I feel that her perspective is with me. Those would be some of my main voices that I regularly listen to.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“something I’ve started saying over the past few years that helped me think about it is — I have so many Jewish friends, both in the United States and other countries, who would agree with this — but the idea that there could not be a sort of alliance between big power countries like the United States and Israel/Palestine that was more equivalent: Why do you have to have only one friend in the region? That’s like the dark side of junior high. In junior high, you learned that you could probably have two friends that are not exactly alike, and you might survive, and in fact, you’d be a much more interesting person. Why couldn’t the United States have two friends? Why couldn’t they ask better questions?”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think many times the way immigrants — people look at immigrants with such a sense of diminishment, as if this person is less than I am because they’ve left their country. Well, I actually think they’re more than we are, because they’re braver. They’ve gone some other place. They have to operate in another language. How easy would that be? If I had to go to China today and start living in China and doing everything in Chinese, it would be very, very hard. So you think about the bravery of these people and the desperation with which they’re trying to find a realm of safety for their families and — just the basic safeties that we take for granted, every day we get up. And I don’t know; I don’t know how a world with so many resources and so many religious traditions and good hopes — how we can keep doing these things to one another in the world that create refugee populations. It just seems outrageous. Why is that happening so much?”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(What is your advice to writers, especially young writers who are just starting out?) NSN: Number one: Read, Read, and then Read some more. Always Read. Find the voices that speak most to YOU. This is your pleasure and blessing, as well as responsibility! It is crucial to make one’s own writing circle – friends, either close or far, with whom you trade work and discuss it – as a kind of support system, place-of-conversation and energy. Find those people, even a few, with whom you can share and discuss your works – then do it. Keep the papers flowing among you. Work does not get into the world by itself. We must help it. Share the names of books that have nourished you. I love Writing Toward Home by Georgia Heard, for example. William Stafford’s three books of essays on the subject of writing – Crossing Unmarked Snow is the most recent – all from the Poets on Poetry series of the University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor – are invaluable. I love so many of these new anthologies that keep popping up. Let that circle be sustenance. There is so much goodness happening in the world of writing today. And there is plenty of ROOM and appetite for new writers. I think there always was. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Attend all the readings you can, and get involved in giving some, if you like to do that. Be part of your own writing community. Often the first step in doing this is simply to let yourself become identified as One Who Cares About Writing! My motto early on was “Rest and be kind, you don’t have to prove anything” – Jack Kerouac’s advice about writing – I still think it’s true. But working always felt like resting to me.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A fundamentalist mind doesn't entertain anything. It latches on, clutches on, to something, and says Only this! That pretty well eliminates metaphor...And fanatics don't ask the questions, and to me that's always been the most critical creative act. It's to ask questions, period. And fundamentalist minds don't. I guess they think they have the answers and so they don't have to ask any more questions. And so I don't trust them. (Maybe the fundamentalist doesn't have the strength for questions.) Maybe not. Or the stretch. The idea that you could stretch and come back to your own shape. That's threatening. And that's one thing that poetry can really give us - the sense of the stretch. That we can always stretch-poems help us feel that about our experiences. Fluent and fluid.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have a personal mission at this time of my life. I really think our culture—our time- has been sickened by the word "busy." That word is one of the worst symptoms of our time. What it about our lives, and how people consider their lives, is sobering. This is not to deny that we all have lots of things we're doing. But I think by saying that we're busy all the time we're negating experience at its heart...It's become a contagious code word of this awful supposed state we place or imagine ourselves in. If we really love poetry, it wants us to give the word "busy" and feeling "busy"...I think that we're denying ourselves experience if we are constantly casting up this smoke screen of busy-ness. Because then we're saying that we can't get to the thing that we really wanted to- but what is that? Have we lost it or let it erode? Who will we be when we get there? Each thing is still one thing.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(And if you could choose something to carry you through, say, the next forty or so years, what would that be?) It's already been given to me. Listening and passing it on! I'm not one of those people who walks around all the time trying to feel worthy of all my life's gifts, although I know people like that and respect them. They're always asking Do I deserve this life I've been given?—I just don't think in those terms. Pass on something good and you'll deserve it. You don't have to be perfect. When I was turning forty, a few years ago, I thought a lot about energy. That was the issue, not age. Not all the dumb things that people want to focus on. To have a kind of vital sense of voice and story, life and word, the essential ongoing energy-I hope to keep inviting it in and not to be one of those people who goes to parties and talks about all the writing grants you've never gotten. Not to turn into one of those petulant, whiny writers. To maintain an energy and openness to what comes my way. That would be what I would hope for.”
Naomi Shihab Nye (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source