Novelists From The United States

"what lovely, larger life becomes ours when we listen to one another"

"I think of poets over the ages sending their voices out into the sky, leaving quiet, indelible trails."

"I think you’re getting paranoid. Let me correct that: you've been paranoid your whole life, and it’s starting to show again."

"Nowism refutes psychology. It says that who you are is who you are. Don’t blame your parents, your upbringing, your culture. Once you are accepting the Now, you’re in control."

"I think people who work on translation projects think that they're somehow peace negotiators because the belief is that we'll never stop killing one another until we understand and see one another as human beings. I think that's true. That's why it is very important to me to receive responses to poems like that from Israeli or Jewish poets; they're even more important than responses from Arab poets. When I get responses from an Israeli Jewish poet saying "I'm listening, I'm sorry, I don't like this either," that matters to me a lot."

"Part of the role of the writer is to encourage other people to discover their voices."

"I've always thought of song writing and poem writing as cousins."

"The texture of Nye's work reflects a life filled with nourishing family and wider human connections, and with travel as well...Always concerned with the detail of daily life and the emotional weight it carries, Nye is a poet who finds poetry everywhere around her, as well as a prose artist who brings to her work keen observation leavened with humor and compassion. Writing, as she says, is for her a necessary act."

"Arab culture is full of great story tellers, and it is one of the favorite pastimes of Arab people. I think that there is a deep hunger in the human psyche for story and the nourishment it gives us. People don't live on one level chatter alone, rhetoric or just the conveyance of news. We need the threading and layering of a day that story gives us, and that's very much from the culture."

"I would strongly suggest that bicultural families such as mine teach their children both languages from the beginning if they can."

"Salma Khadra al-Jayusi has been instrumental in her role as a transmitter of Arabic literature."

"I don't understand how people can disconnect politics from daily life, because that's how politics count. We're daily life people and that's where politics become a reality to us."

"Savvy writer"

"All I really know about death is precisely what I know about the future: it can’t be predicted, and the more you think you know, the less prepared you are for the surprises."

"Language is its own music."

"I say with Naomi Nye, "savoring the close experience of local and international kinship, This is the nectar off which I will feed.""

"We always heard when we were little that to read a poem we needed to read it slowly and we needed to read it more than once and to write a poem you had to pay close attention, write it slowly. And I think we have to live that way. We really do. There's a Thai proverb Life is so short, we must move very slowly. And I think that the word busy-ness finally just has to go. Busy-ness has to go."

"(And if you could choose something to carry you through, say, the next forty or so years, what would that be?) It's already been given to me. Listening and passing it on! I'm not one of those people who walks around all the time trying to feel worthy of all my life's gifts, although I know people like that and respect them. They're always asking Do I deserve this life I've been given?—I just don't think in those terms. Pass on something good and you'll deserve it. You don't have to be perfect. When I was turning forty, a few years ago, I thought a lot about energy. That was the issue, not age. Not all the dumb things that people want to focus on. To have a kind of vital sense of voice and story, life and word, the essential ongoing energy-I hope to keep inviting it in and not to be one of those people who goes to parties and talks about all the writing grants you've never gotten. Not to turn into one of those petulant, whiny writers. To maintain an energy and openness to what comes my way. That would be what I would hope for."

"I always took writing as being a way of thinking."

"Writing...helps us identify what makes the whole geography of our lives."

"It has become very clear to me over the years that Americans, especially young Americans, need to be encouraged to listen to voices from elsewhere. Some of us grow up with the mistaken idea that ours is the only reading and writing culture, and that we are the only literary people in the world. Of course, the United Stated has one of the shortest literary histories in the world, so we need to be reminding children and students to be alert for voices from elsewhere"

"born on a bridge between two cultures, poet Naomi Shihab Nye is like a brilliant, talkative telephone operator in the Global Village: she plugs the reader in, makes connections, audacious comments, lyrical phrases."

"if you read the poems of someone somewhere you know a lot more about that country than you know if you just study its crops or weather conditions."

"Having a child, for the first time, gave me a sense of being part of history, of what being part of an ongoing human species is like. I saw all people in the world differently. I had different empathy for people's situations, once I became a parent."

"I have a personal mission at this time of my life. I really think our culture—our time- has been sickened by the word "busy." That word is one of the worst symptoms of our time. What it about our lives, and how people consider their lives, is sobering. This is not to deny that we all have lots of things we're doing. But I think by saying that we're busy all the time we're negating experience at its heart...It's become a contagious code word of this awful supposed state we place or imagine ourselves in. If we really love poetry, it wants us to give the word "busy" and feeling "busy"...I think that we're denying ourselves experience if we are constantly casting up this smoke screen of busy-ness. Because then we're saying that we can't get to the thing that we really wanted to- but what is that? Have we lost it or let it erode? Who will we be when we get there? Each thing is still one thing."

"Naomi Shihab Nye, for her poems, sisterhood, and heart."

"In "Lunch in Nablus City Park," Naomi Shihab Nye asks, "Where do the souls of hills hide / when there is shooting in the valleys? / What makes a man with a gun seem bigger than a man with almonds?""

"It’s pretty intriguing to follow Naomi Shihab Nye’s idea that most of us actually “think in poems,” whether we know it or not. What she commends as a simple practice of writing explains the surprising power of what I know best from a long life of journaling. The act of writing things down just helps. As she says, it can be a tool to survive in hard times, or to anchor our days, but also to get into a more gracious community with ourselves — or rather, with all of the selves that live on in each of us at any given moment: the “child self, your older self, your confused self, your self that makes a lot of mistakes.” Naomi Shihab Nye was long a self-professed “wandering poet.” Today she’s the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation, while also a professor of creative writing at Texas State University. And one poem she wrote, called “Kindness,” is held close by people around the world."

"Especially when you write, I think, you become cognizant of the little threads carrying us along everywhere, tying us together and linking us up."

"So how can we continue to help-be tuning forks in some way? I guess that's the job of writers. We're tuning forks. We strike a note and it's not what we sing, so much, just that we strike this note-and then that note resonates in someone else's life, maybe they hear a harmonious note in their own lives."

"A fundamentalist mind doesn't entertain anything. It latches on, clutches on, to something, and says Only this! That pretty well eliminates metaphor...And fanatics don't ask the questions, and to me that's always been the most critical creative act. It's to ask questions, period. And fundamentalist minds don't. I guess they think they have the answers and so they don't have to ask any more questions. And so I don't trust them. (Maybe the fundamentalist doesn't have the strength for questions.) Maybe not. Or the stretch. The idea that you could stretch and come back to your own shape. That's threatening. And that's one thing that poetry can really give us - the sense of the stretch. That we can always stretch-poems help us feel that about our experiences. Fluent and fluid."

"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"

"(What is your advice to writers, especially young writers who are just starting out?) NSN: Number one: 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! It is crucial to make one’s own writing circle – friends, either close or far, with whom you trade work and discuss it – as a kind of support system, place-of-conversation and energy. Find those people, even a few, with whom you can share and discuss your works – then do it. Keep the papers flowing among you. Work does not get into the world by itself. We must help it. Share the names of books that have nourished you. I love Writing Toward Home by Georgia Heard, for example. William Stafford’s three books of essays on the subject of writing – Crossing Unmarked Snow is the most recent – all from the Poets on Poetry series of the University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor – are invaluable. I love so many of these new anthologies that keep popping up. Let that circle be sustenance. There is so much goodness happening in the world of writing today. And there is plenty of ROOM and appetite for new writers. I think there always was. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Attend all the readings you can, and get involved in giving some, if you like to do that. Be part of your own writing community. Often the first step in doing this is simply to let yourself become identified as One Who Cares About Writing! My motto early on was “Rest and be kind, you don’t have to prove anything” – Jack Kerouac’s advice about writing – I still think it’s true. But working always felt like resting to me."

"The person who's vanished is the one you really think about."

"Did people who committed acts of violence think their victims and their victims' relatives would just forget? Didn't people see? How violence went on and on like a terrible wheel? (p225)"

"I've always felt that any little bit of other in our lives - even if its that we grew up on the edge of town and all our friends were on the inside of town-gives much more than it takes away."

"For years the word floated in the air around their heads, yellow pollen, wispy secret dust of the ages passed on and on. Habibi, darling, or Habibti, feminine for my darling. (p204)"

"Some people let their countries become their religions and that didn't work either. (p174)"

"If you could be anyone,would you choose to be yourself?"

"what a pleasure just to say words that felt bigger than you were. (p174)"

"When we were born we were blank pieces of paper; nothing had been written yet."

"Some people carried anger around for years, in a secret box inside their bodies, and it grew tighter like a hardening knot. The problem with it getting tighter and smaller was that the people did, too, hiding it...But other people responded differently. They let their anger grow so large it ate them up--even their voices and laughter. And still they couldn't get rid of it. They forgot where it had come from. They tried to shake the anger loose, but no one liked them by now. (p89)"

"Maybe peace was the size of a teacup. (p226)"

"details have always been the doorway by which we approach and apprehend the larger things of the world, the larger truths, whatever they might be."

"All our roots go deep down, even if they’re tangled (p199)"

"Think of all the towns and cities we've never seen or imagined."

"Outside, the sky felt deep and dark as if a large soft blanket had been thrown over the hills and valleys. (p54)"

"Being little was a skin that fit. (p11)"

"She opened her mouth and a siren came out."

""I would like to go to school with the donkeys in the field. To stand all day in the free air with an open mouth. No bells ringing." (p75)"