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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
Coat
Coats
Heavy
Took
Felt
Good
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More quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye

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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
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Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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I want to be someone making music/with my coming.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights you forget you are one of them.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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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
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Peter Conners stunning prose poems are packed with keen sensitivity, dreaminess, and wit. I love his time travels, the vibrant layering of image and detail. Try taking walks as you are reading this book- the dazzle of landscapes, inner and outer, feel replenished and rich. This is language and vision I want to come home to again and again.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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What did exclusivity ever have to offer but a distorted, unrealistic view of the world? People who stuck only to their own kind were scared people.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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If someday, in a morning, you see you, in a mirror or the dent of a spoon, and wonder Where is my soul and Where has it gone, remember this: Catch the gaze of a woman on the metro, subway, tram. Look at a man. Seek and you will find you in the silvered space, a flash between souls.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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The hands are churches that worship the world.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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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 scintillation - let's share starlight.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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I am looking for the human who admits his flaws Who shocks the adversary By being kinder not stronger What would that be like? We don't even know
Naomi Shihab Nye
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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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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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
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Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.
Naomi Shihab Nye