Top 60 Warsan Shire Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Later that night, I held an atlas on my lap, ran my fingers across the whole world, and whispered, ‘where does it hurt?’ It answered, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.”

— Warsan Shire

Featured in: Hurt Quotes, Quotes About Night

2. “My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.”

— Warsan Shire

3. “Light attracts light. But sometimes your light attracts moths and your warmth attracts parasites. Protect your space and energy.”

— Warsan Shire

Featured in: Energy Quotes, Quotes About Light

4. “I belong deeply to myself.”

— Warsan Shire

Featured in: Broken Heart Quotes

5. “It’s not my responsibility to be beautiful. I’m not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you find me.”

— Warsan Shire

Featured in: Responsibility Quotes, Purpose Quotes

6. “You are terrifying, and strange, and beautiful. Something not everyone knows how to love.”

— Warsan Shire

7. “Don’t assume, ask. Be kind. Tell the truth. Don’t say anything you can’t stand behind fully. Have integrity. Tell people how you feel.”

— Warsan Shire

8. “Give your daughters difficult names. Give your daughters names that command the full use of the tongue. My name makes you want to tell me the truth. My name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right.”

— Warsan Shire

9. “At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.”

— Warsan Shire

10. “I am a lover without a lover. I am lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself.”

— Warsan Shire

11. “Document the moments you feel most in love with yourself – what you’re wearing, who you’re around, what you’re doing. Recreate and repeat.”

— Warsan Shire

12. “Perhaps, the problem is not the intensity of your love, but the quality of the people you are loving.”

— Warsan Shire

Featured in: Quality Quotes

13. “I have my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes; on my face they are still together.”

— Warsan Shire

14. “You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘Wow, isn’t he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?’ You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.”

— Warsan Shire

15. “I’m overwhelmed. My biggest downfall is my brightest blessing, I feel too much, all the time. Ya Allah, if it’ll keep my heart soft, break my heart every day.”

— Warsan Shire

16. “Two people who were once very close can without blame or grand betrayal become strangers. Perhaps this is the saddest thing in the world.”

— Warsan Shire

Featured in: Betrayal Quotes

17. “Loving you was like going to war; I never came back the same.”

— Warsan Shire

18. “There’s nothing rebellious about loving something that can’t love you. You’re a woman, you should have known that men in the city would split you in half searching for their fathers in between your legs.”

— Warsan Shire

19. “I want to love, but my hair smells of war and running and running.”

— Warsan Shire

20. “You can’t make homes out of human beings.”

— Warsan Shire

21. “Apathy is the same as war, it all kills you, she says. Slow like cancer in the breast or fast like a machete in the neck.”

— Warsan Shire

22. “There is no intimacy like that between two women who have chosen to be sisters.”

— Warsan Shire

23. “We took such care of tomorrow, but died on the way there.”

— Warsan Shire

24. “I won’t glorify or romanticise heartbreak, for me it was a kind of death and I was forced to keep living.”

— Warsan Shire

25. “If it’ll keep my heart soft, break my heart every day.”

— Warsan Shire

26. “My heart is a flower blossoming out of my mouth.”

— Warsan Shire

27. “I tend to the wound so often, it never heals.”

— Warsan Shire

28. “You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.”

— Warsan Shire

29. “Make peace with your body, it’s not manmade, there are no flaws, there are no mistakes.”

— Warsan Shire

30. “Make love like you have no secrets like you’ve never been left never been hurt like the world don’t owe you a single wretched thing.”

— Warsan Shire

31. “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”

— Warsan Shire

32. “The ego hurts you like this: you become obsessed with the one person who does not love you. blind to the rest who do.”

— Warsan Shire

33. “When I love, I love: wholly, thoroughly, completely, drowning in everything. Every glance can be a conversation, eyes just playing and saying what needs to be said. Silence is loud, and the air becomes heavy. I want you. I want all of you.”

— Warsan Shire

34. “Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women, kitchen of love, bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy. Sometimes, the men, they come with keys, and sometimes the men, they come with hammers.”

— Warsan Shire

35. “I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing.”

— Warsan Shire

36. “To my daughter I will say, ‘when the men come, set yourself on fire.’”

— Warsan Shire

37. “We emotionally manipulated each other until we thought it was love.”

— Warsan Shire

38. “The sun is perfect and you woke this morning. You have enough language in your mouth to be understood. You have a name, and someone wants to call it. Five fingers on your hand and someone wants to hold it. If we just start there, every beautiful thing that has and will ever exist is possible. If we start there, everything, for a moment, is right in the world.”

— Warsan Shire

39. “Your mouth is a lonely place but I keep coming back.”

— Warsan Shire

40. “His eyes were the same colour as the sea in a postcard someone sends you when they love you, but not enough to stay.”

— Warsan Shire

41. “I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel once. I’m bloated with language I can’t afford to forget.”

— Warsan Shire

42. “You haven’t healed, I can tell from how cruel you are.”

— Warsan Shire

43. “Why can’t you see me? Everyone else can.”

— Warsan Shire

44. “Why do you live in your body like you will be given another? As if it were temporary. You starve it, you let anyone touch it, you berate it. Tell it that should be completely different. You tug at your soft flesh, wish it thinner, wish it gone. You fall in love with those who praise the way it sighs under their hands, but who praises the way it holds up your weight, even when you are falling apart?”

— Warsan Shire

45. “How far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps?”

— Warsan Shire

46. “The only darkness we should allow into our lives is the night, for even then, we have the moon.”

— Warsan Shire

47. “Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.”

— Warsan Shire

48. “Her body is one long sigh.”

— Warsan Shire

49. “You were a city exiled from skin, your mouth a burning church.”

— Warsan Shire

50. “I want to lay down, but these countries are like uncles who touch you when you’re young and asleep. Look at all these borders foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate... I spent days and nights in the stomach of the truck; I did not come out the same. Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.”

— Warsan Shire