Top 60 Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Naomi Shihab Nye

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

6. “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

7. “Sometimes there’s no one to listen to what you really might like to say at a certain moment. The paper always listens.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

8. “Being alive is a common road. It’s what we notice makes us different.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

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

— Naomi Shihab Nye

10. “The hands are churches that worship the world.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

11. “You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back – it’s hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

12. “Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

13. “Read, Read, and then Read some more. Always Read. Find the voices that speak most to YOU. This is your pleasure and blessing, as well as responsibility!”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

14. “There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights you forget you are one of them.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

15. “I Still Have Everything You Gave Me 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

16. “Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

17. “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

18. “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

19. “Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

20. “If someday, in a morning, you see you, in a mirror or the dent of a spoon, and wonder Where is my soul and Where has it gone, remember this: Catch the gaze of a woman on the metro, subway, tram. Look at a man. Seek and you will find you in the silvered space, a flash between souls.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

21. “I was a fool, and I will always be a fool, and there will never, never, be a last day of school.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

22. “We all find ourselves involved in projects or activities that confound us-when or why did I say I would do this? What was I thinking? I needed a poem for myself that said-pause longer. Think again.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

23. “Poetry, the most intimate form of expression, gives us a deeper sense of reality than headlines and news stories ever could.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

24. “I have slept so many times you might think I would really be awake by now.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

25. “Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

26. “I’m writing mostly to thank you for living you eighty years and to tell you I love you and think of you often.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

27. “Freedom will feel good to you too. Please acknowledge our higher purpose.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

28. “I do think that all of us think in poems.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

29. “When allowed to return to the class, your feelings of humility and lonesomeness will render you a much finer student and person.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

30. “We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

31. “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

32. “Grief is an ambush. You’re walking along feeling fine, look down, see a leaf, and begin to weep. – Jack.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

33. “If you could be anyone, would you choose to be yourself?”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

34. “A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

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

— Naomi Shihab Nye

36. “I’m the sea, I’m not afraid of the storm. The sea’s dream is always turbulence. If I don’t have waves and storms, I won’t be the sea anymore. I’ll be the pond – and stinking.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

37. “The writing of Kathleen McGookey shines more brightly than most fine things we feel pleasure to read. Celebrate it!”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

38. “The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

39. “I keep thinking, we teach children to use language to solve their disputes. We teach them not to hit and fight and bite. Then look what adults do!”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

40. “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

41. “It is difficult to predict what our finest moments will be, but we know when they happen.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

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

— Naomi Shihab Nye

43. “I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music – Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering ‘The Lost Chord’ on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

44. “Why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

45. “Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

46. “So ask yourself, you swirling tornado of a human being, in a world of disoriented honeybees, do you want to look locked out the minute you sit down?”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

47. “Poetry is everything that headline news is not.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

48. “We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else’s.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

49. “I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we’re living in a story.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

50. “All our roots go deep down, even if they’re tangled.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye