1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

Naomi Shihab Nye , is a poet, songwriter, and novelist. She was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother. Although she calls herself a "wandering poet", she refers to San Antonio as her home. She says a visit to her grandmother in the West Bank village of Sinjil was a life-changing experience. Nye was the recipient of the 2014 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature.

✵ 12. March 1952
Naomi Shihab Nye photo
Naomi Shihab Nye: 11 quotes1 like

Famous Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

“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

Source: Salting the Ocean: 100 Poems by Young Poets

“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.”

Naomi Shihab Nye

Source: I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven

“I am looking for the human who admits his flaws
Who shocks the adversary
By being kinder not stronger
What would that be like?
We don't even know”

Naomi Shihab Nye

Source: Honeybee: Poems Short Prose

“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

Source: 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East

“I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.”

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

Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

“It was terrible when a single conversation with someone determined your whole future relationship.”

Naomi Shihab Nye

Source: There Is No Long Distance Now

“Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.”

Naomi Shihab Nye

“It is dusty on the edges.
It is slightly rotten.
I guard it without thinking.
I focus on it once a year
when I shake it out in the wind.
I do not ache.
I would not trade.”

Naomi Shihab Nye

“Getting over what you did to me is not why I get out of bed anymore.”

Naomi Shihab Nye

Source: Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets under 25

“Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words
and not one of them can save me.”

Naomi Shihab Nye

Source: Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

Similar authors

Frank Herbert photo
Frank Herbert158
American writer None
William Saroyan photo
William Saroyan190
American writer None
Ray Bradbury photo
Ray Bradbury401
American writer None
William Faulkner photo
William Faulkner214
American writer None
Julio Cortázar photo
Julio Cortázar29
Argentinian writer None
David Foster Wallace photo
David Foster Wallace185
American fiction writer and essayist None
Pearl S. Buck photo
Pearl S. Buck95
American writer None
Charles Bukowski photo
Charles Bukowski555
American writer None
Joseph Campbell photo
Joseph Campbell140
American mythologist, writer and lecturer None
Dale Carnegie photo
Dale Carnegie98
American writer and lecturer None