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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
Words
Bucket
Buckets
Cups
Poem
Sky
Wind
Open

More quotes by 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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I'm writing mostly to thank you for living you eighty years and to tell you I love you and think of you often.
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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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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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
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This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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I want to be someone making music/with my coming.
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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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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Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.
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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Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights you forget you are one of them.
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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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 do think that all of us think in poems.
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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Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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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