“Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third.”
-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
“If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.”
-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
“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
“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
“Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless.”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“And if happiness should surprise you again, do not mention its previous betrayal. Enter into the happiness, and burst.”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?”
-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
“She does not love you. Your metaphors thrill her you are her poet. But that’s all there’s to it.”
-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
“We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my visions.”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“And you became like the coffee, In the deliciousness, and the bitterness and the addiction.”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“… For me it is essential, essential for the poet to have a new toast, new songs.”
-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
“We Do as the ascendants to GOD ; the prisoners and the unemployeds Do , we Forget the Pain & Raise Hope ~”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.”
-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
“I know who opens the door to the jasmine tree as it makes our dreams blossom for the evening’s guests.”
-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
“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
“May poetry and God’s name have mercy on us!”
-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
“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 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
“I leave the other side of my life where it wants to stay, and follow the remainder of my life in search of the other side of it.”-Mahmoud Darwish
“So let there be prose. There must be a divine prose for the Prophet to triumph”
-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
“No one has arrived. Leave me there as you would leave a myth with any person who sees you until he cries and rushes into himself, afraid of happiness.”
-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
“This peace will leave us as a cluster of dust…”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“Words are a homeland.”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“Perhaps death is a metaphor to remind us of a secret of life we failed to notice.”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“Where can I write my latest account of the body’s incarnation? It’s the end of what was bound to end! Where is that which ends? Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?”
-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
“I am here. Anything more than that is rumor and slander”
-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
“The long road has drained me of all feelings and expectations. I don’t feel a thing or expect anything now.”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“No night is long enough for us to dream twice.”
-Mahmoud Darwish