120 Quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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

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

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.

Procrastination is the most creative act there is.

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.

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.

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?

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.