“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

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Naomi Shihab Nye 11

American writer 1952

Beverly White (1928–2021) American politician

As quoted in Tooele Transcript-Bulletin https://archive.ph/rZrYW (October 12, 1995)
State in regards to the World Conference on Women, 1995

“Put your arm around the buddy next to you. And if you don't have any friends, I'll be your best friend in the whole world.”

Bert McCracken (1982) American musician

Statement to the audience at a concert, reported in Patrick Donovan (June 3, 2005) "Scream it out loud: Cover Story", The Age, p. 2.

“And for a moment, I understand that I have friends on this lonely path; that sometimes your place is not something you find, but something you have when you need it.”

Libba Bray book Rebel Angels

Source: Rebel Angels

“When your young and hungry and nobody's ever really accepted you because of your color and class, the hurt of your own family having cast you out in the first place still inside you somewhere, you dance hard because there is no other way to live, and when opportunity knocks its more of an abduction than a housecall.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, FOLLOWING YOUR DREAMS

“You can say a lot in a little time, if you stick to words of one syllable.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)

“You will have a story in there… or a character, a place, a poem, a moment in time. When you find it, you will write it. Word after word after word after word.”

Patricia MacLachlan (1938) American writer of children's books

Source: Word After Word After Word

“It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secrets of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones that you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

page 229.
The God of Small Things (1997)
Variant: It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secrets of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones that you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic.

“Wherever you turn, you can find someone who needs you. Even if it is a little thing, do something for which there is no pay but the privilege of doing it. Remember, you don't live in a world all of your own.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

“Somewhere, somehow somebody
Must have kicked you around some.
Tell me why you wanna lay there
And revel in your abandon.
Listen it don't make no difference to me baby,
Everybody's had to fight to be free.
You see you don't have to live like a refugee”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Refugee, written with Mike Campbell
Lyrics, Damn The Torpedoes (1979)

“life is to be lived. if you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.”

Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) film, stage, and television actress

“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.”

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Naomi Shihab Nye 11

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