Mahmoud Darwish Quotes

One man’s exile is but a drop in the sea of human misery

I'm an exile. My father had the courage to leave with his wife, his mother and three children under twelve. It took more courage to leave, to sacrifice everything for freedom, than to stay.

Death is softer by far than tyranny.

I escaped from my home country, Bulgaria, to Czechoslovakia and then to the West.

Exile is like death. You cannot understand it until it happens to you.

Since the 1960s, exile for Haitians is a condition that ends only to begin again.

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

My people are gone into captivity for want of knowledge.

Communism of every type and stripe brings with it an ideological straight jacket. Thought control, brain-washing, censorship, imprisonment, exile, mental and physical torture are the indispensable weapons of Communist rule.

How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet Zion lieth beneath the fetter of Edom, and I in Arab chains? A light thing would it seem to me to leave all the good things of Spain --

The banishment [of Russian Jews], whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one's country is in the nature of things an order to enter another—some other.

War is a tragedy. It's not pretty, and in my opinion, there are no winners. Everybody's a victim, from the one who's suffering pain to the person inflicting it.

Many Palestinians have been living for decades in camps, disconnected from the environment in which they grew up, wallowing in poverty, in neglect, alienation, bitterness, and a deep, unrelenting sense of humiliation.

The two lines from 'Roots' that stick out to me are, 'You no more in Africa. You in America now,' and what I said after Kunta escaped: 'What is it like to be free, Kunta? It must be something.'

For one moment, after I left Jerusalem with my family for life in Illinois, I thought that maybe there's still a chance: maybe there are still enough people in Israel who refuse to rule and oppress another nation.

Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn't die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off.

Please don't set me free Death means a lot me

We have no solution... You [Palestinians] shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,- When he beats his bars and would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee, But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core, But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings- I know why the caged bird sings!

The land of unlimited opportunity was for me, for a long time, impossible to reach. The wall, barbed wire and the order to shoot at those who tried to leave limited my access to the free world.

There were two Avoxes with me in prison. Darius and Lavinia, but the guards mostly called them the redheads. They'd been our servants in the Training Center, so they arrested them, too. I watched them being tortured to death. She was lucky. They used too much voltage and her heart stopped right off. It took days to finish him off. Beating, cutting off parts. They kept asking him questions, but he couldn't speak, he just made these horrible animals sounds. They didn't want information, you know? They wanted me to see it.

Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.

THIS TORTURE Why should we tell you our love stories when you spill them together like blood in the dirt? Love is a pearl lost on the ocean floor, or a fire we can’t see, but how does saying that push us through the top of the head into the light above the head? Love is not an iron pot, so this boiling energy won’t help. Soul, heart, self. Beyond and within those is one saying, How long before I’m free of this torture!

Under dictatorship, the people in prison are always superior to the people who put them there.