Quote

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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Naomi Shihab Nye
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: March 12
Poet
Teacher
University Teacher
Writer
St. Louis
Missouri
Things
Loses
Like
Future
Moment
Broth
Moments
Weakened
Feel
Dissolve
Must
Salt
Feels
Kindness
Really
Lose

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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.
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I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.
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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.
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Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell you 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 we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.
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Where we live in the world is never one place. Our hearts, those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us moons before we are ready for them.
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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.
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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.
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The hands are churches that worship the world.
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I'm not interested in who suffered the most. I'm interested in people getting over it.
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Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.
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This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
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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
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Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
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Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.
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I'm writing mostly to thank you for living you eighty years and to tell you I love you and think of you often.
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