Naomi Shihab Nye

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Jerusalem is so permeated with layers and textures, minglings of all kinds that, once you've lived there you don't get over it."

"I've always felt there was a song right around us all the time. When people are missing that, they need to wake up. They need to find their poetry where they are."

"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."

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

"(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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Language is its own music."

"I hope you feel as I do that it wouldn't be that hard for the United States to have two friends. You know, to have only one good friend seems like the dark side of junior high school. Every time President Obama or any president says, "Israel, you are our enduring friend forever," I think, Okay that's fine, but couldn't you have two friends? What about, "Palestine, you are our friend too." Why not?"

"I have always thought about how stupid and boring violence seems in this world where we could just listen to more stories instead, right? We could ask people who trouble us, Could you tell me your story? Usually I have found when you ask someone to do that, you end up feeling closer to them, even if their story in no way mirrors yours. Find a better thing to do."

"It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in."

"Today you will say things you can predict and other things you could never imagine this minute. Don't reject them, let them come through when they're ready, don't think you can plan it all out..."

"Here at home, the night belonged to the moon. Electricity was rationed, three hours each evening."

"Suheila commented that people argued most where there was least to talk about. If conversation was rich and subjects many, talk kept rolling fluidly, passing over rough spots like water over rocks. But once everything had been said, you started paddling backwards, flinging water and scraping your knees."

"Sometimes it works to fight logic with logic and craziness with craziness. This truth, however, cannot be depended on."

"I kept thinking, as did millions of other people, what can we do? Writers, believers in words, could not give up words when the going got rough. I found myself, as millions did, turning to poetry. But many of us have always turned to poetry. Why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name."

"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!"

"I keep feeling so much gratitude for what we are given in our lives. All of us, by way of accident, by way of things we couldn't have selected ourselves. The worlds we are born into, the people we are related to, the landscapes we learn to love wherever we are."