Quotes from Honeybee: Poems Short Prose

“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

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Popular quotes

“In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: ‘Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’ He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.”
― Helen Macdonald, quote from H is for Hawk

“But it is not really necessary to look too far into the future; we see enough already to be certain that it will be magnificent. Only let us hurry and open the roads.”
― David McCullough, quote from The Wright Brothers

“It isn’t really possible for men to understand how much the world doesn’t want women to be complete people. The most important thing a woman can be, in our society—more important, even, than honest or decent—is identifiable. Even when Libby’s evil—perhaps most of all when she’s evil—she’s easy to categorize, to stick to a board with a pin like some scientific specimen. Those men in Stillwater are terrified of her because being terrified lets them know who she is—it keeps them safe. Imagine how much harder it would be to say, yes, she’s a woman capable of terrible anger and violence, but she’s also someone who’s tried desperately to be a nurturer, to be a good and constructive human being. If you accept all that, if you allow that inside she’s not just one or the other, but both, what does that say about all the other women in town? How will you ever be able to tell what’s actually going on in their hearts—and heads? Life in the simple village would suddenly become immensely complicated. And so, to keep that from happening, they separate things. The normal, ordinary woman is defined as nurturing and loving, docile and compliant. Any female who defies that categorization must be so completely evil that she’s got to be feared, feared even more than the average criminal—she’s got to be invested with the powers of the Devil himself. A witch, they probably would have called her in the old days. Because she’s not just breaking the law, she’s defying the order of things.”
― Caleb Carr, quote from The Angel of Darkness

“Platitudes might satisfy for a short time, father—but soon or late, the people will realize they are being fed form without substance. What I tell them must be the truth, and I must believe it, and I must hold to it.”
― Mercedes Lackey, quote from Exile's Honor

“Nor, says Nora, do we want commonplace tales of hausfrau Angst, of the woman heroically making over her life with a handsome new lover, a beautiful child, a happy ending. Instead, we shall have murder and mayhem, plots and sub-plots, a mad woman in the attic, purloined diamonds, lost birthrights, heroic dogs, a soupçon of sex, a suspicion of philosophy.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Emotionally Weird

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About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.