Mahmoud Darwish Quotes & Sayings

I'll emerge, with wings, from the banner I am, bird
that never alights on trees in the garden
I will shed my skin and my language.
Some of my words of love will fall into
Lorca's poems; he'll live in my bedroom
and see what I have seen of the Bedouin moon. I'll emerge
from almond trees like cotton on sea foam — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

And what I don't understand I grasp it only when it's too late. — Mahmoud Darwish

And we have the night ahead of us
to stroll in lilac-scented gardens. Everything there
is here. It is all ours. You are mine, I am yours
and the shadow, your shadow, laughs like an orange. The dream
did its job and, like a postman, hurried on
to someone else. So we have to be
worthy, this evening, of ourselves, and of a river
that runs along beside us, and that we flow into as it flows into us. — Mahmoud Darwish

When a writer declares that his first book is his best, that is bad. I progress successively from book to book. — Mahmoud Darwish

Longing is the call of ney to ney to restore the direction broken by the horses' hooves in a military campaign. It is an intermittent ailment, neither contagious nor lethal, even when it takes the form of an epidemic. It is an invitation to stay up late with the lonesome and an excuse not to be on equal footing with train passengers who know their own addresses well. It is the transparent fabric of that beautiful nothingness, gathered to roast the coffee of wakefulness for the dreams of strangers. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third. — Mahmoud Darwish

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 ... — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

And you became like the coffee,
In the deliciousness,
and the bitterness
and the addiction. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

I am here. Anything more than that is rumor and slander — Mahmoud Darwish

I see poetry as spiritual medicine. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

I used to love winter,
and I would listen to it,
drop by drop.
Rain, rain like an appeal to a lover,
Pour down my body!
Winter was not lament pointing
to the end of life. It was the beginning. It was hope.
So what shall I do, as life falls like hair?
What will I do this winter? — Mahmoud Darwish

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

So let there be prose.
There must be a divine prose for the Prophet to triumph — Mahmoud Darwish

History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor. — Mahmoud Darwish

To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my visions. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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. — Mahmoud Darwish

When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions. — Mahmoud Darwish

Palestinian people are in love with life. — Mahmoud Darwish

On this earth there is that which deserves life. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

You, who only know love when in love, do not ask what it is, nor do you look for it. But when a woman once asked you if you were in love with love itself, you were evasive and escaped by answering: I love you. She persisted: Do you not love love? You said: I love you, because of you. She left you, because you could not be trusted with her absence. Love is not an idea. It is an emotion that can cool down or heat up. It comes and goes. It is an embodied feeling and has five, or more, senses. Sometimes it appears as an angel with delicate wings that can uproot us from the earth. Sometimes it charges at us like a bull, hurls us to the ground, and walks away. At other times it is a storm we only recognize in its devastating aftermath. Sometimes it falls upon us like the night dew when a magical hand milks a wandering cloud. — Mahmoud Darwish

We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

Maybe the moon is beautiful only because it is far. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

Sonnet V
I touch you as a lonely violin touches the suburbs of the faraway place
patiently the river asks for its share of the drizzle
and, bit by bit, a tomorrow passing in poems approaches
so I carry faraway's land and it carries me on travel's road
On a mare made of your virtues, my soul weaves
a natural sky made of your shadows, one chrysalis at a time.
I am the son of what you do in the earth, son of my wounds
that have lit up the pomegranate blossoms in your closed-up gardens
Out of jasmine the night's blood streams white. Your perfume,
my weakness and your secret, follows me like a snakebite. And your hair
is a tent of wind autumn in color. I walk along with speech
to the last of the words a bedouin told a pair of doves
I palpate you as a violin palpates the silk of the faraway time
and around me and you sprouts the grass of an ancient place - anew — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

For me it is essential, essential for the poet to have a new toast, new songs. — Mahmoud Darwish

O my language,
help me to adapt and embrace the universe. Inside me
there's a balcony no one passes under for a greeting.
And outside me a world that doesn't return the greeting.
My language, will I become what you'll become, or are you
what becomes of me?
[ ... ] For who, if I utter what isn't poetry,
will understand me? Who will speak to me of a hidden
longing for a lost time if I utter what isn't poetry?
And who will know the stranger's land? ... — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

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

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

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

No night is long enough for us to dream twice. — Mahmoud Darwish

A poem exists only in the relation between poet and reader. And I'm in need of my readers, except that they never cease to write me as they would wish, turning their reading into another writing that almost rubs out my features. I don't know why my poetry has to be killed on the altar of misunderstanding or the fallacy of ready-made intent. I am not solely a citizen of Palestine, though I am proud of this affiliation and ready to sacrifice my life in defending the radiance of the Palestinian fact, but I also want to take up the history of my people and their struggle from an aesthetic angle that differs from the prevalent and repeatable meanings readily available from an unmediated political reading. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

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

I look out on my language, two days later
A short absence is enough
for Aeschylus to open the door to peace
a short speech is enough
for Antonio to incite war
A hand of a woman in my hand
is enough
to embrace my freedom
and for the ebb and flow to begin anew in my body
(I See my Ghost Coming from a Distance) — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

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

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

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

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

The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

This peace will leave us as a cluster of dust ... — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

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

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

May poetry and God's name have mercy on us! — Mahmoud Darwish

I never wanted children; maybe I'm afraid of responsibility. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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? — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

Without hope we are lost. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

She drew away
from her shadow,so lightening would pass between the two
like a stranger passes through his poem — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

Perhaps death is a metaphor to remind us of a secret of life we failed to notice. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

My love, I fear the silence of your hands. — Mahmoud Darwish

The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

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

we Do as the ascendants to GOD ; the prisoners and the unemployeds Do , we Forget the Pain & Raise Hope ~ — Mahmoud Darwish

I wish I were a candle in the darkness. — Mahmoud Darwish

Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism. — Mahmoud Darwish

Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body? — Mahmoud Darwish

Come with me tonight so that we might make tonight a shared past, says the one afflicted with longing. I will come with you to make a shared tomorrow, says the one afflicted with love. She does not love the past and wants to forget the war that has ended. He fears tomorrow, because the war has not ended and he does not want to grow older. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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

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

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

Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance, — Mahmoud Darwish

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

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it. — Mahmoud Darwish

The mercy bullet
I envy horses: if they break a leg and feel humiliated because they can no longer charge back and forth in the wind, they are cured by a mercy bullet. So if something in me gets broken, physically or spiritually, I would do well to look for a proficient killer, even if he is one of my enemies. I will pay him a fee and the price of the bullet, kiss his hand and his revolver, and if I am able to write, extol him in a poem of rare beauty, for which he can choose the metre and rhyme. — Mahmoud Darwish

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

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