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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.

Mahmoud Darwish

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Mahmoud Darwish
Age: 67 †
Born: 1941
Born: January 1
Died: 2008
Died: January 1
Author
Poet
Writer
Al-Birweh
M. Darwish
Mahmoud Darwish
Person
Prison
Homeland
However
Exile
Dies
Nightmare
Times
Elsewhere
Born
Transformed
Place
Occupation
May
Oppression
Exiles
Persons
Several
Prisons

More quotes by Mahmoud Darwish

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Without hope we are lost.
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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 have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.
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The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives.
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Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence it breaks walls down.
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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've built my homeland, I've even founded my state - in my language.
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And what I don't understand I grasp it only when it's too late.
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Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace ... with life.
Mahmoud Darwish
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Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism.
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The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.
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I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit--a language to use against these sparkling insects, these jets.
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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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For the Arabs in Israel there is always a tension between nationality and identity.
Mahmoud Darwish
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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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I never wanted children, maybe I'm afraid of responsibility.
Mahmoud Darwish
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My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am no traveller
Mahmoud Darwish
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Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?
Mahmoud Darwish
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I wish I were a candle in the darkness.
Mahmoud Darwish
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... For me it is essential, essential for the poet to have a new toast, new songs.
Mahmoud Darwish