Mahmoud Darwish
History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.Collection: History
Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.Collection: Peace
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.'Collection: Trust
I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.Collection: Poetry
The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.Collection: Poetry
Without hope we are lost.Collection: Hope
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.Collection: Poetry
When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions.Collection: Age
I see poetry as spiritual medicine.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Peace
Sarcasm helps me overcome the harshness of the reality we live, eases the pain of scars and makes people smile.Collection: Smile
To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.Collection: Poetry
The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.
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.
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.
I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.
Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism.
Palestinian people are in love with life.
I never wanted children; maybe I'm afraid of responsibility.
Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.
I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don't hate Jews.
I've built my homeland, I've even founded my state - in my language.
For the Arabs in Israel there is always a tension between nationality and identity.
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.
When a writer declares that his first book is his best, that is bad. I progress successively from book to book.
We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.Collection: Suffering
And I tell myself, a moon will rise from my darkness.Collection: Moon
Nothing is harder on the soul, than the smell of dreams, while they're evaporating.Collection: Dream
We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.Collection: Desire
The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives.Collection: Hurt
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.Collection: Dream
If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.Collection: Hands
Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.Collection: Beautiful
I wish I were a candle in the darkness.Collection: Darkness
She does not love you. Your metaphors thrill her you are her poet. But that's all there's to it.Collection: Love You
On this earth there is that which deserves life.Collection: Earth
Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.Collection: Opposites
Standing here, staying here, permanent here, eternal here, and we have one goal, one, one: to be.Collection: Goal
My love, I fear the silence of your hands.Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Believe
My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am no travellerCollection: Suitcases
Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third.Collection: Two
One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my visions.Collection: Water
Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Morning
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Broken
And what I don't understand I grasp it only when it's too late.Collection: Understanding