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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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Naomi Shihab Nye
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: March 12
Poet
Teacher
University Teacher
Writer
St. Louis
Missouri
Writing
Believe
Think
Encourage
Thinking
Literature
Story
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Stories
More quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye
There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights you forget you are one of them.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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
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
The hands are churches that worship the world.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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
I want to be someone making music/with my coming.
Naomi Shihab Nye
We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else's.
Naomi Shihab Nye
I'm not interested in who suffered the most. I'm interested in people getting over it.
Naomi Shihab Nye
The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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
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
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
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
We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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
I do think that all of us think in poems.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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
