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Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

born 1952 United States

Naomi Shihab Nye (Arabic: نعومي شهاب ناي; born March 12, 1952) is a Palestinian American poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist.

United States
20th-century poets
Authors
Editors
Novelists

Random Naomi Shihab Nye quote

78 quotes

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

with Al Jadid (1996)

I always took writing as being a way of thinking.

with Al Jadid (1996)

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.

with Al Jadid (1996)

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.

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

with Al Jadid (1996)

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

with On Being (2016)

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

with On Being (2016)

On the board was written, "Poetry is a wide-open field." (p183)

The Turtle of Michigan (2022)

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

Conversations with the World by Phebe Davidson (1998)

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

Habibi (1997)

What did exclusivity ever have to offer but a distorted, unrealistic view of the world? People who stuck only to their own kind were scared people

Widening the Circle (1995)

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

with On Being (2016)

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

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

Introduction to This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World (1992)

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

with Al Jadid (1996)

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

Conversations with the World by Phebe Davidson (1998)

the world cannot stay narrow anymore. We are
building bridges among religions

Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018)

"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)

Habibi (1997)

why, out of all the talk, do you remember that thing?

Everything Comes Next (2020)

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)

Habibi (1997)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Naomi Shihab Nye (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.