Mahmoud Darwish Quotes

And you became like coffee, in the deliciousness, and the bitterness, and the addiction.

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

We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.

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

We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.

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 wish I were a candle in the darkness.

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

On this earth there is that which deserves life.

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

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

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

My love, I fear the silence of your hands.

Without hope we are lost.

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.

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

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

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

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.