Naomi Shihab Nye · 176 pages
Rating: (396 votes)
“I am looking for the human who admits his flaws
Who shocks the adversary
By being kinder not stronger
What would that be like?
We don't even know”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, quote from Honeybee: Poems Short Prose
“I have slept so many times you might think I would really be awake by now”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, quote from Honeybee: Poems Short Prose
“Maybe we should just wander around other countries carrying books.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, quote from Honeybee: Poems Short Prose
“I’m still the kid dreaming of the lives she’ll never have but guess what? Maybe she doesn’t want them.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, quote from Honeybee: Poems Short Prose
“Only in words on a page can it still be yesterday.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, quote from Honeybee: Poems Short Prose
“I was a fool, and I will always be a fool, and there will never, never, be a last day of school.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, quote from Honeybee: Poems Short Prose
“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?”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, quote from Honeybee: Poems Short Prose
“He’s mourning his son, number 3000 American dead in Iraq, but as far as he can feel, the worst one.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, quote from Honeybee: Poems Short Prose
“And didn’t we pledge, pledge, pledge, palms on our chests, every day we lived, pledge to the one nation, the freedom we believed in, didn’t we? Fat lot of good.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, quote from Honeybee: Poems Short Prose
“It is difficult to predict what our finest moments will be, but we know when they happen.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, quote from Honeybee: Poems Short Prose
“There are people we have never seen who are busy thinking up things we should be worried about.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, quote from Honeybee: Poems Short Prose
“Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from Three Comrades
“a perception of the cosmic unity of this higher level. And a feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naive faith in causality - the notion that A in the past caused B in the present, which will cause C in the future, when actually A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by opening the doors of perception and experiencing it... in this moment... this supreme moment... this Kairos.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal, an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a central nervous system. In the late 1950's (as in the late 1970's) the animal seemed determined that in all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone, should be established and should prevail; and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory hole. In a later period this impulse of the animal would take the form of blazing indignation about corruption, abuses of power, and even minor ethical lapses, among public officials; here, in April of 1959, it took the form of a blazing patriotic passion for the seven test pilots who had volunteered to go into space. In either case, the animal's fundamental concern remained the same: the public, the populace, the citizenry, must be provided with the correct feelings! One might regard this animal as the consummate hypocritical Victorian gent. Sentiments that one scarcely gives a second thought to in one's private life are nevertheless insisted upon in all public utterances. (And this grave gent lives on in excellent health.)”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Right Stuff
“Once guns were made, who would unmake them? Barrels rested on shoulders and bristled like pincushions above the crowd. There were things, like spoken ideas, that were almost impossible to take back. And he reckoned his people were about to make many more of them.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“Albert, I don’t know how long we can keep Sam involved at all,” she said.
“You’re upset,” Albert replied.
“Yes, I’m upset. But that’s not the point. Sam is out of control. If we’re ever going to have a working system we may have to find someone else to play the role of savior.”
Albert sighed. “Astrid, we don’t know what’s out there in the night. And maybe you’re right that Sam is out of control. But me? I’m really glad it’s him out there getting ready to face whatever it is.”
Albert picked up his omnipresent notebook and left.
To a now empty, silent room, Astrid said, “Don’t die, Sam. Don’t die.”
― Michael Grant, quote from Lies
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