We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.
The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives.
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.
She does not love you. Your metaphors thrill her you are her poet. But that’s all there’s to it.
My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am no traveller.
Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.
Palestinian people are in love with life.
We have to understand – not justify – what gives rise to this tragedy. It’s not because they’re looking for beautiful virgins in heaven, as Orientalists portray it. Palestinian people are in love with life. If we give them hope – a political solution – they’ll stop killing themselves.
My love, I fear the silence of your hands.
To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.
Without hope we are lost.
Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third.
The Palestinians are the only nation in the world that feels with certainty that today is better than what the days ahead will hold. Tomorrow always heralds a worse situation.
Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless.
I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.
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.
One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my visions.
I don’t decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.
When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions.
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.