Quotes from 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.

Coffee should not be drunk in a hurry. It is the sister of time, and should be sipped slowly, slowly. Coffee is the sound of taste, a sound for the aroma. It is a meditation and a plunge into memories and the soul.

I testify that I am free and alive when I am forgotten

The image of love reveals itself there; in a profoundly present absence.

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.

Are we what we do with time, or are we what time does with us?

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

And in your absence, I cried like I never did before I cried with all senses I cried as if I'm raining As if I'm melting all at once.

I used to invent love when necessary. When I walked alone on the riverbank. Or whenever the level of salt would rise in my body, I would invent the river.

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 ?

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

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.

Like a small coffeehouse on the street of exiles That is love, it opens its doors to all.

Do not be absent for too long, then come and ask about how I am, details die with time and stories change.

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

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

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.

So which of your Lord's favors do you two deny? You and I are absent, you and I are present and absent. So which of your Lord's favors do you two deny?

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?

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!

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)

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

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

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