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”
“I have slept so many times you might think I would really be awake by now”
“Maybe we should just wander around other countries carrying books.”
“I’m still the kid dreaming of the lives she’ll never have but guess what? Maybe she doesn’t want them.”
“Only in words on a page can it still be yesterday.”
“I was a fool, and I will always be a fool, and there will never, never, be a last day of school.”
“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?”
“He’s mourning his son, number 3000 American dead in Iraq, but as far as he can feel, the worst one.”
“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.”
“It is difficult to predict what our finest moments will be, but we know when they happen.”
“There are people we have never seen who are busy thinking up things we should be worried about.”
“Actually, I’m extremely dissatisfied with being who I am. It’s nothing to do with my looks or abilities or status or any of that. It simply has to do with being me. The situation strikes me as grossly unfair.”
“For a long time I’d been fed on the wheat of The Imitation. It was the only book which did me any good, as I hadn’t discovered the treasures of the Gospels. I knew every chapter by heart. I was never without this little book.”
“The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)”
“Madeline displayed the bright sadder-but-wiser outlook of an alert first grader who’d discovered the alphabet in a school where Ecclesiastes is the primer—life is futility, a deeply terrible experience, but the really serious thing is reading.”
“...I made some more threats. I've got this big knife back here." He poked his thumb over his shoulder. "It attracts a lot of attention sometimes.”
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