Palestinian people are in love with life.

I see what I want of Love… I see horses making the meadow dance, fifty guitars sighing, and a swarm of bees suckling the wild berries, and I close my eyes until I see our...

I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.

Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism.

I see a bird carrying me and carrying you, with us as its wings, beyond the dream, to a journey that has no end and no beginning, no purpose and no goal. I do not...

I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don’t hate Jews.

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

Don’t say that poetry, my friend, is beautifulor powerfulfor there is no powerful or beautiful poetryThere is poetry that strikes you, secretlywith the diseases of writing and schizophrenia, and you raveand your self leaves you...

We see them oiling their weapons to kill the gryphon they think is hiding in our hen coop. And we cannot help laughing.

The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.

I never wanted children; maybe I’m afraid of responsibility.

They want time to move fast so they can paint their nails a provocative red and wear high heels that crack walnuts and make people jump. He wants time to slow down so he can...

In Damascus:poems become diaphanousThey’re neither sensualnor intellectualthey are what echo saysto echo . . .

History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.

The Arabs are ready to accept a strong Israel with nuclear arms – all it has to do is open the gates of its fortress and make peace.

If we want toWe will become a people, if we want to, when we learn that we are not angels, and that evil is not the prerogative of othersWe will become a people when we...

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...

To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.

I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them asingle word: Home.

Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.

For the Arabs in Israel there is always a tension between nationality and identity.

The mercy bulletI envy horses: if they break a leg and feel humiliated because they can no longer charge back and forth in the wind, they are cured by a mercy bullet. So if something...

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.

I’ve built my homeland, I’ve even founded my state – in my language.

Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third.

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

When a writer declares that his first book is his best, that is bad. I progress successively from book to book.

Put it on record–I am an ArabAnd the number of my card is fifty thousandI have eight childrenAnd the ninth is due after summer.What’s there to be angry about?Put it on record.–I am an ArabWorking...

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.

When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions.

Sarcasm helps me overcome the harshness of the reality we live, eases the pain of scars and makes people smile.

Some people ask, ‘How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?’ I say, ‘My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions...

Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless.

Without hope we are lost.

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.