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Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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Naomi Shihab Nye
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: March 12
Poet
Teacher
University Teacher
Writer
St. Louis
Missouri
Like
Coat
Coats
Heavy
Took
Felt
Good
More quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye
I'm writing mostly to thank you for living you eighty years and to tell you I love you and think of you often.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.
Naomi Shihab Nye
... the real heroes of race and culture would always be the people who stepped out of their own line to make a larger circle.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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.
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
My father was very disappointed by war and fighting. And he thought language could help us out of cycles of revenge and animosity. And so, as a journalist, he always found himself asking lots of questions and trying to gather information. He was always very clear to underscore the fact that Jewish people and Arab people were brother and sister.
Naomi Shihab Nye
I want to be someone making music/with my coming.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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!
Naomi Shihab Nye
The hands are churches that worship the world.
Naomi Shihab Nye
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
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
Today you will say things you can predict and other things you could never imagine this minute. Don't reject them, let them come through when they're ready, don't think you can plan it al out. This day will never, no matter how long you live, happen again. It is exquisitely singular. It will never again be exactly repeated.
Naomi Shihab Nye
We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else's.
Naomi Shihab Nye
There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights you forget you are one of them.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Naomi Shihab Nye
I do think that all of us think in poems.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.
Naomi Shihab Nye
our limbs which had already traveled far beyond her world, carrying the click of distances in the smooth, untroubled soles of their shoes.
Naomi Shihab Nye
