120 Quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we find poems.

Fresh as a new notebook — that's how anyone wanted to live.Hopeful as a pencil sharpened,clear as one beam of light landing on the table's far side.

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of wordsand not one of them can save me.

The person you have known a long tme is embedded in you like a jewel. The person you have just met casts out a few glistening beams & you are fascinated to see more of them. How many more are there? With someone you've barely met the curiosity is intoxicating.

like our parents alwaystold us not to likefirefighters warn againstwe're playinggames and makingthe rules upas we go we'rematchingwarmth to warmthstarting fires burningwishes into ourskin we're hiddenholdingforbidden lightswe're childrenwhose fathers havenever taught nevertouchbut we're findingthese new flameswe smotherat the sound of footsteps.

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

Boy and EggEvery few minutes, he wantsto march the trail of flattened rye grassback to the house of mutteringhens. He too could makea bed in hay. Yesterday the egg so freshit felt hot in his hand and he pressed itto his ear while the other childrenlaughed and ran with a ball, leaving him,so little yet, too forgetful in games,ready to cry if the ball brushed him,riveted to the secret of birdscaught up inside his fist,not ready to give it overto the refrigeratoror the rest of the day.

To forgive ourselves for what we didn't doReplay a scene over and over in mindChange it changeApologizing to our own story handful of soilI could have planted something better hereTo walk without remembering another walkTo wash off the hoped of a darkened dayMake a new one

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