Naomi Shihab Nye Quotes

I don't think you have to have experienced things to understand them.

Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

I'm nosey, and I have a great imagination. So it's not necessarily things I have to go through, but it's things people I know or my family is going through, and I hear about it, and I think, 'That sounds like a great song.'

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.

When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

Reading opens your mind and helps you understand and empathize with people who are unlike you and outside your breadth of experience.

Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.

The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.

To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.

A good novel is an out-of-self experience. It lifts you off the ground so that you have the sensation of flying. It says, 'Look at the world around you; learn from the people in these pages, neither quite me nor quite you, how life is lived in so many different ways.'

I think one of my better gifts as a writer is empathy.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

I don't eschew autobiographical writing, but I'm not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out its meaning for myself. The human being's ability to make a metaphor to describe a human experience is just really cool.

The funny thing about writing is, although you are writing about an experience which only you have had, you are trying to welcome other people into it, and there are ways I think of doing this, and one of them is through the senses, through the sounds and the smells.

When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.