Quotes About Identity

There is him and there is his condition. They are two entities, forced to live in one body.

It is possible to be in love with you just because of who you are.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Out of my ignorance, I called you a homeland and I forgot homelands are taken away.

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

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

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?

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

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

Words are a homeland.

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?

Where is my second road to the staircase of expanse? Where is futility? Where is the road to the road? And where are we, the marching on the footpath of the present tense, where are we? Our talk a predicate and a subject before the sea, and the elusive foam of speech the dots on the letters, wishing for the present tense a foothold on the pavement …

You ask: What is the meaning of "homeland"? They will say: The house, the mulberry tree, the chicken coop, the beehive, the smell of bread, and the first sky. You ask: Can a word of eight letters be big enough for all of these, yet too small for us?

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?

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

Everything around me looks like me and I look like nothing here

And writing is not enough for me to declare: I found my presence filling in absence and whenever I searched for myself I found others and whenever I searched for them I found only myself the stranger Am I a crowd of one?

From afar, the poems come. I resemble you, yet I do not become you. I become you, yet I do not resemble you.

How much I love you! How much you are you! and intimidated by his own soul: There is no I now, but she is now in me. No she, but I am in her fragility. How I fear For my dream, lest it see a dream that is not she at The end of this song… — Mahmoud Darwish, from "The Strangers' Walk," Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? , trans. by Mohammad Shaheen ( Hesperus Press, 2014)