You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the challenge of understanding the experiences of refugees for those who have a stable home to return to.
Naomi Shihab Nye's quote prompts reflection on the stark difference in perspectives between those who enjoy the security of a stable home and those who are forced from theirs. It encourages empathy towards refugees, urging us to recognize the profound instability and fear that defines their reality, which is often beyond the comprehension of those who have never faced such circumstances.
In practice
This quote can be shared at a community event to foster understanding and support for refugees.
It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.
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 love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.
A boy told me if he roller-skated fast enough his loneliness couldn't catch up to him, the best reason I ever heard for trying to be a champion. What I wonder tonight pedaling hard down King William Street is if it translates to bicycles. A victory! To leave your loneliness panting behind you on some street corner while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas, pink petals that have never felt loneliness, no matter how slowly they fell.
I think whenever you love something or somebody it means that you have to extend yourself, you have to grow - get a little larger. You can't stay in your little comfortable - spot.
As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.
The underlying message of the Neighborhood is that if somebody cares about you, it's possible that you'll care about others. 'You are special, and so is your neighbor' - that part is essential: that you're not the only special person in the world. The person you happen to be with at the moment is loved, too.
What tale do you like best to hear?' 'Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme - courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe - marriage.
Everybody has the right to marry the person they love and be represented as a couple and family... It's something that people will look back on in years to come and say, 'I can't believe it took so long for us to recognize this.' It'll be like segregation and giving women the right to vote.
We women feel we are here to serve. That's the mistake we make. We may have children, husbands, lovers, bills, responsibility. Those things don't own us, but too often we let them.
Our society’s failure to recognize and care for the social and emotional well-being of our boys contributes to a nation of young men who navigate adversity and conflict with an incomplete emotional skill set. Whether boys and later men have chosen to resist or conform to this masculine norm, there is loneliness, anxiety, and pain.
My books are always about somebody who is taken from aloneness and isolation - often elevated loneliness - to community. It may be a denigrated community that is filthy and poor, but they are not alone; they are with people.
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