Quotes from Naomi Shihab Nye

My mother used to tell me when I went somewhere, "Please leave your foolishness at home." But how could I do that? It was stuck on me.

Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.

Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.

I do think that all of us think in poems.

It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me - after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq - 'You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.'

you will never catch up. Walk around feeling like a leaf know you could tumble at any second. Then decide what to do with your time. --The Art of Disappearing

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.

The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.

I'm writing mostly to thank you for living you eighty years and to tell you I love you and think of you often.

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.

I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.

This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

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!

Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old.

Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.

I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that -- if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that's a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise, you just feel assaulted by all of the tragedy in the world.

My mother used to tell me when I went somewhere, Please leave your foolishness at home. But how could I do that? It was stuck on me.

What would it be like to be a turtle inside a shell hit by hailstones?

Most days weren't clear when you were in them.