Ben Okri Quotes & Sayings

Our time here is magic! It's the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It's the only space. — Ben Okri

But to hear Mozart in a bombed city: how much more beautiful it sounds, as if it were composed to somehow soothe the ruins, to promise a wiser future rising from the rubble. — Ben Okri

I learned that life will go through changes - up and down and up again. It's what life does. — Ben Okri

To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home. — Ben Okri

Knowledge of self ought to be the great project of our lives. Knowing ourselves we will know others. Only by knowing ourselves can we begin to undo the madness we unleash on the world in our wars, our destruction of the environment, our divisions, our desire to dominate others, the poverty we create and exploit. Only through self-knowledge can we reverse the damage we do with all the worldly knowledge we have, which has been only a higher ignorance. — Ben Okri

If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom. — Ben Okri

It was a night replaying its corrosive recurrence on the road of our lives, on the road which was hungry for great transformations. — Ben Okri

I was going to be a scientist. — Ben Okri

The dead shook off their rust of living and seized up steel. Their lips quivered with the defiance of innocents, with manipulations of politicians and their interchangeable dreams, and with the insanity of thugs who don't even know for which parties they commit their atrocities. — Ben Okri

inverse of the word live is evil. — Ben Okri

So long as a canvas is empty its potential is infinite ... The empty canvas can become a gateway into the landscape of nightmares or a vision of sensual bliss. — Ben Okri

You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone. — Ben Okri

I became a sceptic of one way of seeing the world. And I think it is what started me in my awareness that any worldview is superstitious. — Ben Okri

The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like. — Ben Okri

He felt there had to be 'something'. He felt human beings must create, each in their own way, and that it was only by the application of vision, only by making things, that we could transform the negative 'nothing'. — Ben Okri

The poem is never complete in the mind. It emerges, and then it's like an act of unveiling. The unveiling is the longest and most difficult part of it. — Ben Okri

People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. — Ben Okri

One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man. — Ben Okri

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations. — Ben Okri

When we've been travelling around I've often thought: Oh, this would be a good place to be, and that would be an excellent place to live. And yet, after I've seen everything I've decided that home, wherever that may be, is the place for feelings of peace. And if I can be at peace with myself then that is the most important thing. I think travelling teaches one that. — Ben Okri

It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that. — Ben Okri

I held you in the square
And felt the evening
Re-order itself around
Your smile. — Ben Okri

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' had a formative effect on me. I think it's one of those works that if you encounter it very early you're doubly enchanted by the beauty of the language and the strangeness of the vision. It stays with you. — Ben Okri

We can still astonish the gods in humanity
And be the stuff of future legends,
If we but dare to be real,
And have the courage to see
That this is the time to dream
The best dream of them all. — Ben Okri

Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases. — Ben Okri

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry. — Ben Okri

I study people all the time. For some reason, we're not very good at seeing what's there or hearing what we're hearing. — Ben Okri

There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild. — Ben Okri

The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time. — Ben Okri

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide. — Ben Okri

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare. — Ben Okri

I know that human beings are capable of anything. — Ben Okri

People who look like human beings are not human beings. Strange people are amongst us. We must be careful. Our lives are changing. Our gods are silent. Our ancestors are silent. A great something is going to come from the sky and change the face of the earth. — Ben Okri

When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self. — Ben Okri

The highest kind of writing - which must not be confused with
the most ambitious kind ... belongs to the realm of grace. Talent is
part of it, certainly; a thorough understanding of the secret laws,
absolutely. But finding the subject and theme which is in perfect
harmony with your deepest nature, your forgotten selves, your hidden
dreams, and the full unresonated essence of your life - now that
cannot be reached through searching, nor can it be stumbled upon
through ambition. That sort of serendipity comes upon you on a
lucky day. It may emerge even out of misfortune or defeat. You may
happen upon it without realising that this is the work through
which your whole life will sing. We should always be ready. We
should always be humble. Creativity should always be a form of
prayer. — Ben Okri

It may be that what you could be haunts you. It is real. It is a weight you have to carry around. Each failure to become, to be, is a weight. Each state you could inhabit is a burden as heavy as any physical weight, but more so, because it weighs on your soul. It is the ghost of your possibilities hanging around your neck, an invisible albatros, potentials unknowingly murdered. — Ben Okri

The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it — Ben Okri

The worst time was 1983. Love and life and everything went wrong. I reached absolute rock bottom. I saw the Minotaur at the bottom of the abyss. I learnt of the harshness of the world and its impartiality to human failure. — Ben Okri

Storytellers ought not be too tame. They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society. They are best in disguise. If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys. — Ben Okri

I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there. — Ben Okri

It is easier to get lost within sight of the palace. [ ... ] Hope makes all things near, and so can prove treacherous. — Ben Okri

I am one year older than Nigeria at 51. In a human life, 51 might be old. But it is very young for a nation. By that, I mean a Nigeria conscious of itself as a nation. — Ben Okri

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry. — Ben Okri

To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something. — Ben Okri

What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them. — Ben Okri

A tolerable hell is better than an impossible heaven. — Ben Okri

Strange things are happening to us.'To our children.'They say
he is looking for the spirit of Independence.'They say he is looking for himself.'For his own
spirit.'Which he lost when the white man came. — Ben Okri

If we are true, if we can love, if we have vision, if we can have courage, we can, we should, we ought to, we will ... — Ben Okri

TWars are not fought on battlegrounds but in a space smaller than the head of a needle. — Ben Okri

There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy ... But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason ... A love, inspired, it seems, by the gods, which it is impossible to fight, distort, destroy, or weaken. In fact, the attempts to destroy such loves only strengthen them. And to do nothing allows them to continue to grow at their natural pace, inexoribly, till this love becomes a wide and silent adoration. — Ben Okri

He had to learn how not to let his eyes be bewildered by manifestations, and thereby learn to treat appearances as signs and codes of the interior. — Ben Okri

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it. — Ben Okri

The intelligence that shaped the universe, shaped you. There is an inner part of us, for ever obscured, for ever mysterious, which is most alive during the process of composition. And that inner part, that inner glow, is timeless, and it functions beyond time. It drinks from deep waters. It has the stillness and the dance and the radiance of firmament. When one is most absorbed in the act of creation one almost feels that one is wandering in the great corridors of all minds. Creativity makes us part of it all. — Ben Okri

Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind. — Ben Okri

Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians. — Ben Okri

Can you understand what the rats are saying?"
"No. But I can kill them."
"Why?"
"Because they are never satisfied. They are like bad politicians and imperialists and rich people."
"How?"
"They eat up property. They eat up everything in sight. And one day when they are very hungry they will eat us up. — Ben Okri

When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are. — Ben Okri

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader. — Ben Okri

In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, we are also living the stories we planted - knowingly or unknowingly - in ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change or lives. — Ben Okri

Fire is one of my temperaments. It is behind all my work ... Fire is a chemical presence. — Ben Okri

We ought to step out of our old, hard casing. We think that we are one kind of people, when in fact we are always creating ourselves. We are not fixed. We are constantly becoming, constantly coming into being. — Ben Okri

Understanding is a pure glass of water. All great truths have no taste. Hints of sweetness are coloured by the need for amazement. — Ben Okri

One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us. — Ben Okri

Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you've got left is your belief in the imagination. — Ben Okri

Her eyes were narrowed as if they were endlessly trying to exclude most of what they saw. — Ben Okri

If I don't say the thought right I might destroy it. — Ben Okri

The road will never swallow you. The river of destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger. Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you. — Ben Okri

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn't care to sit next to in a train, people that don't exist, places you've never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader's creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive. — Ben Okri

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger. — Ben Okri

Will you be at the harvest,
Among the gatherers of new fruits?
Then you must begin today to remake
Your mental and spiritual world,
And join the warriors and celebrants
Of freedom, realizers of great dreams.
You can't remake the world
Without remaking yourself.
Each new era begins within.
It is an inward event,
With unsuspected possibilities
For inner liberation.
We could use it to turn on
Our inward lights.
We could use it to use even the dark
And negative things positively.
We could use the new era
To clean our eyes,
To see the world differently,
To see ourselves more clearly.
Only free people can make a free world.
Infect the world with your light.
Help fulfill the golden prophecies.
Press forward the human genius.
Our future is greater than our past. — Ben Okri

Do you know what the luckiest thing is?'
'No.'
'It is to be at home everywhere. — Ben Okri

Nothing is more difficult than knowing what you really think. — Ben Okri

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we're born into stories. I say we're also born from stories. — Ben Okri

Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love. — Ben Okri

To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they — Ben Okri

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it's moorings or orientation ... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger. — Ben Okri

At the heart of 'The Famished Road' is a philosophical conundrum - for me, an essential one: what is reality? Everybody's reality is subjective; it's conditioned by upbringing, ideas, temperament, religion, what's happened to you. — Ben Okri

The only power poor people have is their hunger. — Ben Okri

I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you. — Ben Okri

His mind had been unhinged by the blast of detonators, nights spent with corpses and by the superstitious incredulity of having killed so many white men. — Ben Okri

Some of my reactions are very Nigerian. I still believe that words are things. — Ben Okri

A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life. — Ben Okri

We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right. — Ben Okri

Politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible. — Ben Okri

I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality. — Ben Okri

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering. — Ben Okri

Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest. Don't try and press it down. Don't hide from it. Don't escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That's the way life goes. — Ben Okri

I noticed that in a corner, across from where they ate with such innocent relish, sitting forlorn and abandoned, was the ghost of their son. He had lost both of his arms, one side of his face was squashed, and both his eyes had burst. He had bluish wings. He was the saddest ghost in the house. — Ben Okri

I mean we desperately wanted to be in love with something or other. We were lonely people. It seemed more sensible to fall in love with another person who also wanted to fall in love, than to love a chair or a cat or an idea. — Ben Okri

When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in. — Ben Okri

You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones. — Ben Okri

We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination. — Ben Okri

Home can be the friend you have been searching for all your life or the person you met once very briefly. — Ben Okri

Don't fear. You will always have something to struggle for, even if it is beauty or joy. — Ben Okri

We never think that our mothers will die. It was like suddenly an abyss opened at my feet - I was standing on nothing. It was the strangest thing. Her passing away ripped the solidity out of the world. — Ben Okri

The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things. — Ben Okri

a dream can be the highest point of a life — Ben Okri

It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of your mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world. — Ben Okri

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories — Ben Okri

The greatest religions convert the world through stories. — Ben Okri