Naomi Shihab Nye Short Quotes

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I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body...

Naomi Shihab Nye
Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.

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

Naomi Shihab Nye
Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.

Naomi Shihab Nye
The real heroes of race and culture would always be the people who stepped out of their own line to make a larger circle.

Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

Naomi Shihab Nye
Where we live in the world is never one place. Our hearts, those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us moons before we are ready for them.

Naomi Shihab Nye
My mother used to tell me when I went somewhere, "Please leave your foolishness at home." But how could I do that? It was stuck on me.

Naomi Shihab Nye
Our limbs which had already traveled far beyond her world, carrying the click of distances in the smooth, untroubled soles of their shoes.

Naomi Shihab Nye
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.

Naomi Shihab Nye
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

Naomi Shihab Nye
I can never see fashion models,
lean angular cheeks, strutting hips
and blooming hair, without thinking of
the skulls at the catacombs in Lima, Peru.

Naomi Shihab Nye
You will never catch up. Walk around feeling like a leaf know you could tumble at any second. Then decide what to do with your time. —The Art of Disappearing

Naomi Shihab Nye
Mystery: Everything felt better before you got there than when you actually got there. When you actually got there, you didn't quite have the energy to be there.

Naomi Shihab Nye
Only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye
It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
...
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

Naomi Shihab Nye