Best Mahmoud Darwish Quotes

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

#4. Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism.

Mahmoud Darwish

#5. 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

#6. 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

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

#9. 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

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

#14. 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

#15. 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

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

Mahmoud Darwish

#17. 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

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

#24. 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

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

Mahmoud Darwish

#26. 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

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

Mahmoud Darwish

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. Words are a homeland.

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish