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

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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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Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.
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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!
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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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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.
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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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We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.
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I want to be someone making music/with my coming.
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Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.
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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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We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else's.
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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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Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
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The person you have known a long tme is embedded in you like a jewel. The person you have just met casts out a few glistening beams & you are fascinated to see more of them. How many more are there? With someone you've barely met the curiosity is intoxicating.
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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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It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.
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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.
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A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.
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This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
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The hands are churches that worship the world.
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