Maya Gill

“Let the rest of your dream sleep by an open window so that it can catch up with you when it awakens with the blue dawn. Dreams will find their dreamers and all a dreamer has to do is remember.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

“Dearly I yearn for my mother’s bread,
My mother’s coffee,
Mother’s brushing touch.
Childhood is raised in me,
Day upon day in me.
And I so cherish life
Because if I died
My mother’s tears would shame me.”
― Mahmoud Darwish

“They wrote their narrative: We have returned. They wrote our narrative: They have returned to the desert. They put us on trial: Why were you born here? We said: Why was Adam born in paradise?”
― Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

“Exiles have a shared smell: the smell of longing for something else; a smell that remembers another smell.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence