Quotes from Naomi Shihab Nye

You Have to Be Very Careful" You have to be careful telling things. Some ears are tunnels. Your words will go in and get lost in the dark. Some ears are flat pans like the miners used looking for gold. What you say will be washed out with the stones. You look for a long time till you find the right ears. Till then, there are birds and lamps to be spoken to, a patient cloth rubbing shine in circles, and the slow, gradually growing possibility that when you find such ears they already know.

To know the difference, you must run this mountain without pause. In the evening or the afternoon, you must cross the first fields waking to your footsteps, stormwashed at the foothills. In the evening or the afternoon, in the closing of a shadowline, you must read aloud the reddened last words of this canyon's leaves to the trees that clap their hands.

Amal, you look stunned, said Mrs. Melchor. Have you been struck by lightning between classes? Yes, she said. The lightning of ignorance. Mrs. Melchor raised her eyebrows.

So ask yourself, you swirling tornado of a human being, in a world of disoriented honeybees, do you want to look locked out the minute you sit down?

When they invite you to the party Remember what parties are like Before answering.

I'm still the kid dreaming of the lives she'll never have but guess what? Maybe she doesn't want them.

our limbs which had already traveled far beyond her world, carrying the click of distances in the smooth, untroubled soles of their shoes.

Because Ali did not want to see the deep pools of his kind teacher's eyes and fall into them. He didn't know how to swim.

why are we so monumentally slow?

the long sorrow of the color red.

Or maybe his reclusiveness was a decisive marketing strategy-if you disappear, people are more interested in your work. You become a legend while you're still alive. Crouching behind a stonewall, or the post under a house...people are kneeling down to find you.

You will no longer pick this sage that flavors your whole life.

what twists or rage greater than we could ever guess had savaged skylines, thousands of lives?

the years go by, we find our doors and windows. Some are always open, some never were.

But I know we need to keep warm here on earth And when your shawl is as thin as mine is, you tell stories.

Maybe we should just wander around other countries carrying books.

I'm the sea, I'm not afraid of the storm. The sea's dream is always turbulence. If I don't have waves and storms, I won't be the sea anymore. I'll be the pond— and stinking.

Only in words on a page can it still be yesterday.

I was a fool, and I will always be a fool, and there will never, never, be a last day of school.

Poetry, the most intimate form of expression, gives us a deeper sense of reality than headlines and news stories ever could.

Fresh as a new notebook — that's how anyone wanted to live. Hopeful as a pencil sharpened, clear as one beam of light landing on the table's far side.

To forgive ourselves for what we didn't do Replay a scene over and over in mind Change it change Apologizing to our own story handful of soil I could have planted something better here To walk without remembering another walk To wash off the hoped of a darkened day Make a new one

But we love you," my parents said. "We love you very much." I know, but they loved me as a girl. The boy within me was stuck with me. Not till much later did I find out that the boy within was really a girl.

No one lives in these regions of rock and sun. It is a lucky part of the world; to grow old without buildings and roadways, to dissolve quietly without feeling stunned.