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

More quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye

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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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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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A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.
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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 thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.
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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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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.
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The hands are churches that worship the world.
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It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.
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Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.
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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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There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights you forget you are one of them.
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Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
Naomi Shihab Nye