Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Naomi Shihab Nye
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: March 12
Poet
Teacher
University Teacher
Writer
St. Louis
Missouri
Children
Fight
Thinking
Teach
Fighting
Language
Disputes
Use
Bite
Keep
Bites
Look
Solve
Looks
Adults

More quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye

Image
I do think that all of us think in poems.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Image
Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Image
A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Image
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
Image
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Image
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
Image
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Image
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
Image
I want to be someone making music/with my coming.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Image
We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Image
I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Image
... 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
Image
It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The hands are churches that worship the world.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Image
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
Image
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