Quotes by Mahmoud Darwish
Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.
I've built my homeland, I've even founded my state - in my language.
Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism.
Sarcasm helps me overcome the harshness of the reality we live, eases the pain of scars and makes people smile.
History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.
To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.
Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.
I see poetry as spiritual medicine.
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.'
When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions.
The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.
When a writer declares that his first book is his best, that is bad. I progress successively from book to book.
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.
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.
Without hope we are lost.
Palestinian people are in love with life.
I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don't hate Jews.
The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.
I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.
I never wanted children; maybe I'm afraid of responsibility.
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.
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.
For the Arabs in Israel there is always a tension between nationality and identity.
I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.
