Quotes from Mahmoud Darwish

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.

Without hope we are lost.

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

On this earth there is that which deserves life.

I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

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

Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism.

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

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

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.

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

Palestinian people are in love with life.

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.

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.