Mahmoud Darwish Quotes

#1. In Damascus:
the traveler sings to himself:
I return from Syria
neither alive
nor dead
but as clouds
that ease the butterfly's burden
from my fugitive soul

Mahmoud Darwish

#2. Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.

Mahmoud Darwish

#3. Nothing is harder on the soul, than the smell of dreams, while they're evaporating.

Mahmoud Darwish

#4. Words are a homeland.

Mahmoud Darwish

#5. Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.

Mahmoud Darwish

#6. A bit of mist and light suffice for life to overpower nothingness. A bit of hope and time suffice for you to cross the mountain trails of myth; you were spared the fate of your ancestors. So borrow the wisdom of the anemones and say: Nothingness does not concern me, even if death besieges me.

Mahmoud Darwish

#7. When the image is identical to reality, the imagination is compelled to be neutral. Therefore let the image of the object lie to the object so we can see what lies beyond the object, and in the light of that vision see what saves us from nothingness.

Mahmoud Darwish

#8. In Damascus:
poems become diaphanous
They're neither sensual
nor intellectual
they are what echo says
to echo ...

Mahmoud Darwish

#9. How often have I held back my complaint: Why should the Lebanese homeland be incompatible with Palestine? Why should the Egyptian loaf be incompatible with Palestine? Why should the Syrian roof be incompatible with Palestine? Why should Palestine be incompatible with Palestine?

Mahmoud Darwish

#10. Perhaps death is a metaphor to remind us of a secret of life we failed to notice.

Mahmoud Darwish

#11. The Palestinians are the only nation in the world that feels with certainty that today is better than what the days ahead will hold. Tomorrow always heralds a worse situation.

Mahmoud Darwish

#12. I never wanted children; maybe I'm afraid of responsibility.

Mahmoud Darwish

#13. Standing here, staying here, permanent here, eternal here, and we have one goal, one, one: to be.

Mahmoud Darwish

#14. To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.

Mahmoud Darwish

#15. And you became like the coffee,
In the deliciousness,
and the bitterness
and the addiction.

Mahmoud Darwish

#16. She does not love you. Your metaphors thrill her you are her poet. But that's all there's to it.

Mahmoud Darwish

#17. The only paradise we know through our senses and intuition is that of the beloved, and the only hell, disappointment in love.

Mahmoud Darwish

#18. I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.

Mahmoud Darwish

#19. Maybe the moon is beautiful only because it is far.

Mahmoud Darwish

#20. We journey towards a home that does not halo our head with a special sun.
Mythical women applaud us. A sea for us, a sea against us.

Mahmoud Darwish

#21. Please take your time. I want you to kill me slowly so I can write my last
poem to my wife's heart. They laughed, and took from me
only the words dedicated to my wife's heart.

Mahmoud Darwish

#22. Sarcasm helps me overcome the harshness of the reality we live, eases the pain of scars and makes people smile.

Mahmoud Darwish

#23. I wish I were a candle in the darkness.

Mahmoud Darwish

#24. The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

Mahmoud Darwish

#25. If you live, live free
or die like the trees, standing up.

Mahmoud Darwish

#26. We have to understand - not justify - what gives rise to this tragedy. It's not because they're looking for beautiful virgins in heaven, as Orientalists portray it. Palestinian people are in love with life. If we give them hope - a political solution - they'll stop killing themselves.

Mahmoud Darwish

#27. We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.

Mahmoud Darwish

#28. The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives.

Mahmoud Darwish

#29. I leave the other side of my life where it wants to stay, and follow the
remainder of my life in search of the other side of it.

Mahmoud Darwish

#30. I prepare my portrait for my woman to hang on a wall when I die.
she says: Is there a wall to hang it on?
I say: We'll build a room for it. Where? In any house.

Mahmoud Darwish

#31. Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism.

Mahmoud Darwish

#32. Later, we'll look up what was recorded in our history about yours in faraway lands.
Then we'll ask ourselves, Was Andalusia here or there? On earth, or only in poems?

Mahmoud Darwish

#33. The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read.
They taught me I had a language in heaven
and another language on earth.

Mahmoud Darwish

#34. I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.

Mahmoud Darwish

#35. If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.

Mahmoud Darwish

#36. Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She's not a symbol.

Mahmoud Darwish

#37. I am from there. I am from here. I am not there and I am not here. I have two names, which meet and part, and I have two languages. I forget which of them I dream in.

Mahmoud Darwish

#38. And what I don't understand I grasp it only when it's too late.

Mahmoud Darwish

#39. The long road has drained me of all feelings and expectations. I don't feel a thing or expect anything now.

Mahmoud Darwish

#40. we Do as the ascendants to GOD ; the prisoners and the unemployeds Do , we Forget the Pain & Raise Hope ~

Mahmoud Darwish

#41. A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare.

Mahmoud Darwish

#42. Had I known you, I would have possessed you, and had you known me, you would have possessed me. But then you and I would not be.

Mahmoud Darwish

#43. History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.

Mahmoud Darwish

#44. I love you so, you are so much yourself!
He is so afraid of his soul:
no "I" now but she. She is now within me.
And no "she" now but only my fragile "I"
At the end of this song, how much I fear that my dream
may not see its dream in her.

Mahmoud Darwish

#45. This peace will leave us as a cluster of dust ...

Mahmoud Darwish

#46. My love, I fear the silence of your hands.

Mahmoud Darwish

#47. Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'

Mahmoud Darwish

#48. For the Arabs in Israel there is always a tension between nationality and identity.

Mahmoud Darwish

#49. Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance,

Mahmoud Darwish

#50. Palestinian people are in love with life.

Mahmoud Darwish

#51. I'll search in mythology and archeology
and in every -ology to my old name.
one of the goddesses of Canaan will side with me,
then swear with a flash of lightning.
This is my orphan son

Mahmoud Darwish

#52. I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

Mahmoud Darwish

#53. We see them oiling their weapons to kill the gryphon they think is hiding in our hen coop. And we cannot help laughing.

Mahmoud Darwish

#54. No one has arrived. Leave me there
as you would leave a myth with any person who sees you
until he cries and rushes into himself, afraid of happiness.

Mahmoud Darwish

#55. I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.

Mahmoud Darwish

#56. He says I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here. I have two names which meet and part ... I have two languages, but I have long forgotten - which is the language of my dreams

Mahmoud Darwish

#57. If there must be a moon, let it be high,
a high moon made in Baghdad, neither Arab, nor Persian,
nor claimed by the goddesses all around us.

Mahmoud Darwish

#58. Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.

Mahmoud Darwish

#59. May poetry and God's name have mercy on us!

Mahmoud Darwish

#60. When a writer declares that his first book is his best, that is bad. I progress successively from book to book.

Mahmoud Darwish

#61. The image of love reveals itself there; in a profoundly present absence.

Mahmoud Darwish

#62. The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.

Mahmoud Darwish

#63. A poet need not trouble himself if he lies. He lies only in the matter of love, as the regions of the heart are open to tempting conquest.

Mahmoud Darwish

#64. I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word:
Homeland..

Mahmoud Darwish

#65. So let there be prose.
There must be a divine prose for the Prophet to triumph

Mahmoud Darwish

#66. The Arabs are ready to accept a strong Israel with nuclear arms - all it has to do is open the gates of its fortress and make peace.

Mahmoud Darwish

#67. We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April's hesitation, the aroma of bread at dawn, a woman's point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute's sigh and the invaders' fear of memories.

Mahmoud Darwish

#68. No night is long enough for us to dream twice.

Mahmoud Darwish

#69. I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
single word: Home.

Mahmoud Darwish

#70. Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?

Mahmoud Darwish

#71. So which of your Lord's favors do you two deny? You and I are absent, you and I are present and absent. So which of your Lord's favors do you two deny?

Mahmoud Darwish

#72. For me it is essential, essential for the poet to have a new toast, new songs.

Mahmoud Darwish

#73. When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions.

Mahmoud Darwish

#74. And I tell myself, a moon will rise from my darkness.

Mahmoud Darwish

#75. And if happiness should surprise you again, do not mention its previous betrayal.
Enter into the happiness, and burst.

Mahmoud Darwish

#76. On this earth there is that which deserves life.

Mahmoud Darwish

#77. Don't say that poetry, my friend, is beautiful
or powerful
for there is no powerful or beautiful poetry
There is poetry that strikes you, secretly
with the diseases of writing and schizophrenia, and you rave
and your self leaves you for another

Mahmoud Darwish

#78. In a world that has no heaven the earth becomes an abyss.
And the poem is one of its consolation prizes.
One of the qualities of the winds, north or south

Mahmoud Darwish

#79. I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit
a language to use against these sparkling insects, these jets.

Mahmoud Darwish

#80. I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don't hate Jews.

Mahmoud Darwish

#81. My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am no traveller

Mahmoud Darwish

#82. I've built my homeland, I've even founded my state - in my language.

Mahmoud Darwish

#83. The poem is neither here nor there, and with a girl's breast
it can illuminate the nights.
With the glow of an apple it fills two bodies with light
and with a gardenia's breath it can revive a homeland!

Mahmoud Darwish

#84. because you are die surface of my sky.
My body is the land,
the place for you...
the pigeons fly
the pigeons come down...

Mahmoud Darwish

#85. Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless.

Mahmoud Darwish

#86. The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.

Mahmoud Darwish

#87. Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

Mahmoud Darwish

#88. Without hope we are lost.

Mahmoud Darwish

#89. Where should we go after the last frontiers ?
Where should the birds fly after the last sky ?
Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air ?

Mahmoud Darwish

#90. They want time to move fast so they can paint their nails a provocative red and wear high heels that crack walnuts and make people jump. He wants time to slow down so he can prolong the enjoyment of walking among them, of being next to this self-contained beauty.

Mahmoud Darwish

#91. I am here. Anything more than that is rumor and slander

Mahmoud Darwish

#92. Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third.

Mahmoud Darwish

#93. I know who opens the door to the jasmine tree
as it makes our dreams blossom for the evening's guests.

Mahmoud Darwish

#94. We are captives, even if our wheat grows over the fences/ and swallows rise from our broken chains./ We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.

Mahmoud Darwish

#95. I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold

Mahmoud Darwish

#96. Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace ... with life.

Mahmoud Darwish

#97. One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my visions.

Mahmoud Darwish

#98. She drew away
from her shadow,so lightening would pass between the two
like a stranger passes through his poem

Mahmoud Darwish