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

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

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

— Mahmoud Darwish

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

— Mahmoud Darwish

History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.

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

— Mahmoud Darwish

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

— Mahmoud Darwish

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

— 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