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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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Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.
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This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
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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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It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.
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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.
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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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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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Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.
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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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We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.
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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.
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The hands are churches that worship the world.
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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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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 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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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
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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.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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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.
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.
Naomi Shihab Nye