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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
Look
Solve
Looks
Adults
Children
Fight
Thinking
Teach
Fighting
Language
Disputes
Use
Bite
Keep
Bites

More quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye

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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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I'm not interested in who suffered the most. I'm interested in people getting over it.
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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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There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights you forget you are one of them.
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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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I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.
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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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We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else's.
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This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
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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 do think that all of us think in poems.
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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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The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.
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We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.
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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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A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.
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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!
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.
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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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It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.
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