Mahmoud Darwish Quotes

Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless.

~ Mahmoud Darwish

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.

~ Mahmoud Darwish

I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold

~ Mahmoud Darwish

I see what I want of Love... I see horses making the meadow dance, fifty guitars sighing, and a swarm of bees suckling the wild berries, and I close my eyes until I see our shadow behind this dispossessed place... I see what I want of people: their desire to long for anything, their lateness in getting to work and their hurry to return to their folk... and their need to say: Good Morning...

~ Mahmoud Darwish

I see a bird carrying me and carrying you, with us as its wings, beyond the dream, to a journey that has no end and no beginning, no purpose and no goal. I do not speak to you, and you do not speak to me; we listen only to the music of silence. Silence is the friend's trust of friend, imagination's self-confidence between rain and rainbow. A rainbow is inspiration provoking the poet, uninvited, the infatuation of the poet with the prose of the Quran. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown? We are absent, you and I; we are present, you and I. And absent. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown?

~ Mahmoud Darwish

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

~ Mahmoud Darwish

The mercy bulletI envy horses: if they break a leg and feel humiliated because they can no longer charge back and forth in the wind, they are cured by a mercy bullet. So if something in me gets broken, physically or spiritually, I would do well to look for a proficient killer, even if he is one of my enemies. I will pay him a fee and the price of the bullet, kiss his hand and his revolver, and if I am able to write, extol him in a poem of rare beauty, for which he can choose the metre and rhyme.

~ Mahmoud Darwish

Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third.

~ Mahmoud Darwish

In Damascus:poems become diaphanousThey’re neither sensualnor intellectualthey are what echo saysto echo . . .

~ Mahmoud Darwish

History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.

~ Mahmoud Darwish

Sarcasm helps me overcome the harshness of the reality we live, eases the pain of scars and makes people smile.

~ Mahmoud Darwish

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

~ Mahmoud Darwish

I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

~ Mahmoud Darwish

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.

~ Mahmoud Darwish