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A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.

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
Bucket
Buckets
Cups
Poem
Sky
Wind
Open
Words

More quotes by 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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I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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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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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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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I want to be someone making music/with my coming.
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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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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This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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I do think that all of us think in poems.
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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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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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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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
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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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We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else's.
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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Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Naomi Shihab Nye