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

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
Self
Collective
Represent
Decide
Memory
Except
Memories
Full
Anything
Collectives

More quotes by Mahmoud Darwish

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I see poetry as spiritual medicine.
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I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don't hate Jews.
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My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am no traveller
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Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.
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Without hope we are lost.
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Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.
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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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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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Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?
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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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For the Arabs in Israel there is always a tension between nationality and identity.
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And I tell myself, a moon will rise from my darkness.
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I am from there. I am from here. I am not there and I am not here. I have two names, which meet and part, and I have two languages. I forget which of them I dream in.
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And what I don't understand I grasp it only when it's too late.
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To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.
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Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.
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I wish I were a candle in the darkness.
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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.
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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 have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.
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