Quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye

… the real heroes of race and culture would always be the people who stepped out of their own line to make a larger circle.

Hero

Race

Real

A boy told me if he roller-skated fast enough his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him, the best reason I ever heard for trying to be a champion. What I wonder tonight pedaling hard down King William Street is if it translates to bicycles. A victory! To leave your loneliness panting behind you on some street corner while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas, pink petals that have never felt loneliness, no matter how slowly they fell.

Boys

Kings

Loneliness

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

Buckets

Sky

Wind

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.

Shoes

Sleep

Writing

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.

Meaningful

Perspective

Poetry

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.

Hurricanes

Save Me

Sometimes

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

Kindness

Knows

Sorrow

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

Kindness

Moments

Salt

Being alive is a common road. It’s what we notice makes us different.

Alive

Common

Different

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

Be Good

Coats

Heavy

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Abundance

Alive

Art

Be Good

Beautiful

Bed

Believe

Bird

Blue

Body

Book

Boys

Brother

Buckets

Children

Church

Class

Clouds

Coats

Common

Compassion

Conversation

Country

Couple

Determined

Different

Disappear

Disconnected

Distance

Dream

Dust

Encouragement

Energy

Facts

Fashion

Father

Feelings

Felt

Fighting

Fire

Flaws

Forget

Forget You

Gaps

Girl

Grief

Groups

Grows

Hair

Hands

The Future Blueprint

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The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

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The Autobiography

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The Behaviour Diary

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The Dating Diary

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The Relationship Therapist

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Quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye

… the real heroes of race and culture would always be the people who stepped out of their own line to make a larger circle.

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

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.

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.

Being alive is a common road. It’s what we notice makes us different.

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

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Topics by Naomi Shihab Nye

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

The Relationship Therapist

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