Quotes by "Mahmoud Darwish"

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.

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

Be my lover between two wars waged in the mirror, she said. I don't want to return now to the fortress of my father's house. Take me to your vineyard. Let me meet your mother. Perfume me with basil water. Arrange me on silver dishes, comb me, imprison me in your name, let love kill me.

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

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

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

I see what I want of Love... I see horses making the meadow dance, fifty guitars sighing, and a swarm of bees suckling the wild berries, and I close my eyes until I see our shadow behind this dispossessed place... I see what I want of people: their desire to long for anything, their lateness in getting to work and their hurry to return to their folk... and their need to say: Good Morning...

I see a bird carrying me and carrying you, with us as its wings, beyond the dream, to a journey that has no end and no beginning, no purpose and no goal. I do not speak to you, and you do not speak to me; we listen only to the music of silence. Silence is the friend's trust of friend, imagination's self-confidence between rain and rainbow. A rainbow is inspiration provoking the poet, uninvited, the infatuation of the poet with the prose of the Quran. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown? We are absent, you and I; we are present, you and I. And absent. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown?

History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism.

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.

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