Mahmoud Darwish Quotes
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Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third.
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And you became like coffee, in the deliciousness, and the bitterness, and the addiction.
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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!
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To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.
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I see poetry as spiritual medicine.
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I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.
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For the Arabs in Israel there is always a tension between nationality and identity.
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Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.
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The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives.
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I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.
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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.
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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.
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We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.
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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.
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I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold
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She does not love you. Your metaphors thrill her you are her poet. But that's all there's to it.
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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.
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I wish I were a candle in the darkness.
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Nothing is harder on the soul, than the smell of dreams, while they're evaporating.
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My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am no traveller
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My love, I fear the silence of your hands.
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The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.
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The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.
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We have to understand - not justify - what gives rise to this tragedy. It's not because they're looking for beautiful virgins in heaven, as Orientalists portray it. Palestinian people are in love with life. If we give them hope - a political solution - they'll stop killing themselves.
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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.
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Palestinian people are in love with life.
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Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.
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May poetry and God's name have mercy on us!
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On this earth there is that which deserves life.
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Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism.
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