Naomi Shihab Nye

"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)"

""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)"

"Maybe the hardest thing about moving overseas was being in a place where no one but your own family had any memory of you. It was like putting yourself back together with little pieces. (p80)"

"In Jerusalem so much old anger floated around, echoed from fading graffiti, seeped out of cracks. Sometimes it bumped into new anger in the streets. The air felt stacked with weeping and raging and praying to God by all the different names. (p89)"

"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)"

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

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

"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."

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

"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)"

"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)"

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

"When you liked somebody, you wanted to trade the best things you knew about. You liked them not only for themselves, but for the parts of you that they brought out. (p255)"

"There was a door in the heart that had no lock on it."

""You will need to be brave. There are hard days coming. There are hard words waiting in people’s mouths to be spoken. There are walls. You can’t break them. Just find doors in them." (p258)"

"It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness."

"Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible."

"(What attracted you to poetry?) That was a lifetime, instinctive connection. I loved the ways poetry worked on the page and in our brains. I loved the spaciousness about poetry—the space around the lines and room for your own thinking. I love the variety of voices. (2024)"

"Palestinians are all haunted. We’re haunted by what used to be, what could have been, what we dream could be, what we would prefer for all the people who are living there right in the heart of it—and have everything at stake. (2024)"

"I feel very close to that part of each of us which remains young, idealistic, and curious. (2019)"

"When people tilt their heads just slightly to imagine another person's experience, the space inside the mind grows. (2019)"

"I am moved by her (Janna Jihad Ayyad) as I have always been moved by the struggle of Palestinian people to maintain any kind of regular normal life under extremely harsh circumstances. (2019)"

"If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn't realize the teacher was saying, 'Make it shine. It's worth it.' Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It's a new vision of something. It means you don't have to be perfect the first time. What a relief! (2014)"

"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. (2012)"

"(BM: So "the fuel that feeds you" is the power of words?) NSN: I think so. The power of words, and a faith in the power of words. That words can give you something back if you trust them, and if you know that you're not trying to proclaim things all the time, but you're trying to discover things. (2002)"

"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.' They'll feel closer to that place in a different way. (2002)"

"those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like...How do they maintain any shred of dignity and balance? You know those are the courageous people to me. All the-- simple people of the earth who-- don't lose their sanity in the face of-- constant-- disease in the world they live in. Who keep sending their children to school, who keep combing their children's hair. How do they do that? (2002)"

"if you are a person in the habit of listening to yourself, to others, and then to your memory, then you may be more likely to hear other incredible things like a tree talk to you when you need a tree to talk to you, or the future give you a little bit of a direction. Maybe even you will hear a voice from your past giving you some guidance that you need right at that moment when you need it. I have felt that happen many times. I’m sure that it’s common that you suddenly hear the voice of your teacher from long ago. You haven’t even thought of that person in years, or seen them in many years, and suddenly, you hear something they used to suggest to their class and it comes back to you right when you needed it. There’s so much interesting listening that we can do. I think that kind of listening, it’s here to serve us, but also, we have to be ready for it."

"I used to get in trouble a lot when I was a kid in elementary school for, well, what the teacher would call daydreaming. It was daydreaming, but I always felt that it was almost deeper. I remember wanting to respond and say something like, “Well, it’s not just daydreaming. I’m in a hypnotic trance, thinking about the blood inside my body right now, and all the different things it’s doing that I will never see"...that feeling of being transported by the miracle that we’re living inside of it every minute, and we often don’t even think about it."

"I’ve always been very cognizant of voices in the air, although I don’t usually hear them as distinctly as I did with the “Kindness” poem, but without a doubt, I carry my father’s and I hear him all the time. For poets, I carry W.S. Merwin and William Stafford. Those were two of my favorite poets from my teenage years, whose voices live in me forever. I am such a grateful reader of their work. I had no idea that I would become personal friends with both of them. I feel very lucky to have known them. Also, so many women like Lucille Clifton, whom I valued her voice and her strength and her counsel, her mighty spirit. I feel like her voice is with me always. My Palestinian grandmother is with me, and even though we didn’t speak the same language, I feel that her perspective is with me. Those would be some of my main voices that I regularly listen to."

"One of the reasons I don’t like the phrase “somebody passes away,” it’s so flimsy, it’s so vague, it sounds just like a wisp in the wind. No, they don’t, they die and then they stay in so many ways within us, around us in everything they loved. I just feel very, very strongly about that"

"just today, some students I was talking to in a Skype class in Kuwait — how much I love the modern world, that we can do these things."

"I think that is very important, not feeling separate from text — feeling your thoughts as text or the world as it passes through you as a kind of text; the story that you would be telling to yourself about the street even as you walk down it or as you drive down it; as you look out the window, the story you would be telling. It always seemed very much to me, as a child, that I was living in a poem — that my life was the poem."

"I think I said this like 40 years ago in a poem — use a single word as an oar that could get you through the days, just by holding a word, thinking about it differently, and seeing how that word rubs against other words, how it interplays with other words. There’s a luxury in that kind of thinking about language and text, but it’s very basic, as well. It’s simple. It’s invisible. It doesn’t cost anything."

"The minute you place yourself above, what does that do to others?"

"it’s mysterious how these power structures unfold, isn’t it, and how we’re willing to accept them and allow them to prevail without questioning them."

"something I’ve started saying over the past few years that helped me think about it is — I have so many Jewish friends, both in the United States and other countries, who would agree with this — but the idea that there could not be a sort of alliance between big power countries like the United States and Israel/Palestine that was more equivalent: Why do you have to have only one friend in the region? That’s like the dark side of junior high. In junior high, you learned that you could probably have two friends that are not exactly alike, and you might survive, and in fact, you’d be a much more interesting person. Why couldn’t the United States have two friends? Why couldn’t they ask better questions?"

"There are just so many mysteries about people wanting to presume their pain has more of a reality than someone else’s pain. And I think all the holy persons of all backgrounds and faiths have always called upon us to empathize in a more profound way, to stretch our imaginations to what that other person might be experiencing. And it sounds so basic, but these days, when you listen to the loud voices, you wonder, what’s happened to that? What’s happened to the awareness that we don’t have to be vindictive and continue on in a cycle of revenge and violence?"

"That feeling of being connected to someone else, when you allow yourself to be very particular, is another mystery of writing."

"You can sit down and write three sentences — how long does that take, three minutes, five minutes? — and be giving yourself a very rare gift of listening to yourself, just finding out, when you go back and look at what you wrote. And how many times we think, “Oh, I would never have remembered that if I hadn’t written it down — when and how did that even occur to me? I sort of like it, this week, and it could help me, and now I want to connect it to something else.”"

"People I read a lot to my son were people like Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton, Frank O’Hara for some reason, Chinese poems, Japanese poems."

"I think many times the way immigrants — people look at immigrants with such a sense of diminishment, as if this person is less than I am because they’ve left their country. Well, I actually think they’re more than we are, because they’re braver. They’ve gone some other place. They have to operate in another language. How easy would that be? If I had to go to China today and start living in China and doing everything in Chinese, it would be very, very hard. So you think about the bravery of these people and the desperation with which they’re trying to find a realm of safety for their families and — just the basic safeties that we take for granted, every day we get up. And I don’t know; I don’t know how a world with so many resources and so many religious traditions and good hopes — how we can keep doing these things to one another in the world that create refugee populations. It just seems outrageous. Why is that happening so much?"

"As readers and writers, we find a certain home in books and language and literature — like I hear a Mary Oliver poem, and it’s as if I’ve been her neighbor, because I’ve read so many of her poems, even though I’ve never spent a day in her town."

"“Cross That Line” is an important poem to me because I loved Paul Robeson so much as a child."

"I liked the portable, comfortable shape of poems. I liked the space around them and the way you could hold your words at arm’s length and look at them. And especially the way they took you to a deeper, quieter place, almost immediately."

"Sometimes while traveling in Mexico or India or any elsewhere, I feel that luminous sense of being invisible as a traveler, having no long, historical ties, simply being a drifting eye…but after awhile, I grow tired of that feeling and want to be somewhere where the trees are my personal friends again."

"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."