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Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

— Naomi Shihab Nye Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems (2020)

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More quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye

Greedy men say "More!" to war
Sitting together telling stories
could change that but who will take the time?

Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018)

Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.

Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018)

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

Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems (2020)

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.

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

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

All Naomi Shihab Nye quotes →

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

From now on, everything in life will appear blurry to me. What’s the point of wiping my glasses when my vision has already left me?"

Sanu Sharma

You can never plan the future by the past.

Edmund Burke A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

Nothing is there to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now does always last.

Abraham Cowley Poems (1656)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Naomi Shihab Nye (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.