Unfortunately, It Was Paradise Quotes

“We are captives, even if our wheat grows over the fences/ and swallows rise from our broken chains./ We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read.
They taught me I had a language in heaven
and another language on earth.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“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, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“No night is long enough for us to dream twice.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
single word: Home.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April’s hesitation, the aroma of bread at dawn, a woman’s point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute’s sigh and the invaders’ fear of memories.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“Please take your time. I want you to kill me slowly so I can write my last
poem to my wife's heart. They laughed, and took from me
only the words dedicated to my wife's heart.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my visions.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“There is no name for what life should be, except
what you did and what you do to my soul.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“I love you so, you are so much yourself!
He is so afraid of his soul:
no "I" now but she. She is now within me.
And no "she" now but only my fragile "I"
At the end of this song, how much I fear that my dream
may not see its dream in her.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“If there must be a moon, let it be high,
a high moon made in Baghdad, neither Arab, nor Persian,
nor claimed by the goddesses all around us.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“After you nothing goes and nothing returns.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“We journey towards a home that does not halo our head with a special sun.
Mythical women applaud us. A sea for us, a sea against us.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“I know who opens the door to the jasmine tree
as it makes our dreams blossom for the evening's guests.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“I prepare my portrait for my woman to hang on a wall when I die.
she says: Is there a wall to hang it on?
I say: We'll build a room for it. Where? In any house.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“May poetry and God's name have mercy on us!”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“Where can I write my latest account of the body's incarnation?
It's the end of what was bound to end! Where is that which ends?
Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“So let there be prose.
There must be a divine prose for the Prophet to triumph”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“The poem is neither here nor there, and with a girl's breast
it can illuminate the nights.
With the glow of an apple it fills two bodies with light
and with a gardenia's breath it can revive a homeland!”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“Memory has the fragrance of a weeping night flower arousing in the exile's blood a need for singing: Lift up my grief, so I can retrieve my time.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“We still live as if death mistakes us. We—who are capable of remembrance—are capable of liberation.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“Like a balcony, I gaze upon whatever I desire. I gaze upon my ghost approaching from afar.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“May life suddenly open on the wing of a butterfly fluttering over a rhyme for those who do not care about meaning.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“Wouldn't it be better if we defied our ages
and gazed much longer at the last sky before moonset?
Addresses for the soul, outside this place. I love to travel
to any wind ... But I don't love to arrive.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

“I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold — Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (University of California Press; 0 edition, January 6, 2003)”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems