Mahmoud Darwish Quotes

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Mahmoud Darwish

Profession : Poet

Birth : March 13, 1941

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

Mahmoud Darwish

Without hope we are lost.

Mahmoud Darwish

History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.

Mahmoud Darwish

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.

Mahmoud Darwish

Palestinian people are in love with life.

Mahmoud Darwish

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.

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

I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism.

Mahmoud Darwish

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

I never wanted children; maybe I'm afraid of responsibility.

Mahmoud Darwish

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.

Mahmoud Darwish

I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

Mahmoud Darwish

When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions.

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

Mahmoud Darwish

The Arabs are ready to accept a strong Israel with nuclear arms - all it has to do is open the gates of its fortress and make peace.

Mahmoud Darwish