Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.

Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

I read a lot of books. So, usually when I go home I try to re-charge my batteries and absorb new stories to become inspired again.

Poetry is the honey of all flowers, the quintessence of all sciences, the marrow of wit, and the very phrase of angels.

Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say, ‘Thou art no Poet may’st not tell thy dreams?’ Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

Poetry's magic lies in the imagery which satifies even without interpretation..it is accepted as easily as it was created.

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.

Alekhine is a poet who creates a work of art out of something that would hardly inspire another man to send home a picture post card.

A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.

Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?

Some poems are like the Centaurs--a mingling of man and beast, and begotten of Ixion on a cloud.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember.

[To become a poet] The most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.

The true poet is a friendly man. He takes to his arms even cold and inanimate things, and rejoices in his heart.