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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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Naomi Shihab Nye
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: March 12
Poet
Teacher
University Teacher
Writer
St. Louis
Missouri
Always
Circles
Would
Hero
People
Line
Lines
Race
Stepped
Culture
Circle
Real
Heroes
Make
Larger

More quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye

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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
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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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I do think that all of us think in poems.
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.
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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.
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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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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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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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.
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
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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.
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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This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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I want to be someone making music/with my coming.
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 hands are churches that worship the world.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.
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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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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Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.
Naomi Shihab Nye