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Okri Quotes & Sayings

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Top Okri Quotes

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

I was going to be a scientist. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

We are victims of censorship within when we do not let ourselves think the thoughts which our flesh recoils from, or let conscience speak that which the heart feels to be unacceptable, or when we give ourselves excellent reasons for not participating in this grand drama of our interconnected lives. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

inverse of the word live is evil. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

The school-children were in their uniforms. A cock crowed repeatedly. Mum got her tray together. I was ready for school. Mum went down the street, swaying, moving a little sleepily, with one more burden added to her life. She was merely a detail in the poverty of our area. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

You cannot come to a Nigerian restaurant without having pepper soup. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

They made me think. Everything has to fight to live. Rats work very hard. If we are not careful they will inherit the earth. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends' floors, was happy, was miserable. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

I was born left-handed, but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing 'Famished Road,' which was very long, I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed, so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser, so later on I had to change it. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

He felt as if he hadn't slept because he spent all night wandering through the world looking for a maiden who bore his heart in her womb. His heart grew in her like a child. He was pregnant with his heart for a long time, for a year, for ten years, for a generation, for a hundred and two years. His heart grew bigger and bigger in her, and she grew bigger and bigger to accomodate the growth of his heart in her womb. He never knew when she would give birth to his heart and he lost her and searched the world over and never found her. His father, the king, told him that the world in which he searched for he was his heart, and that she was the mother of all the world, and that his search was over when it began, but he didn't know it. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

If You Look Too Deeply Everything Breaks Your Heart. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

He thought about how the camera makes one fall in love with an image of oneself, and perpetuates a false reality. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

In a world where no one listens, where no one seems to care, where hatred is greater than love, where hearts are hardened by vengeance and pride, where violence is preferable to peace, what else is there for him to do but heal the wounded, and bury the dead, in a war that could go on forever? — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings?
The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one's place in the world - a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By Aberjhani

His [Ben Okri's] work poses very serious questions for the twenty-first century. Among them: To what extent will we allow the indefinable dynamics of something called "destiny" to maintain grief and horror in the world? How hard are human beings willing to fight to achieve and sustain justice, equanimity, or joy? And should progress be called such when it devours what is best within the human spirit? — Aberjhani

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Victor Fernando R. Ocampo

With a combination of proper lighting and climate control he managed to achieve a different ecological niche in each gallery. In the African section, where the imbrications of Augustine, Mafouz and Okri lay decomposing, he grew sorghum and Dioscorea yams. In the Chinese gallery where the Tao Te Ching and countless Confucian annotations moldered, he grew rice, crab apples and barley. Over the poems of Neruda and Borges himself, he grew potatoes. Each plant in this new Eden he lovingly tainted with the virus of civilization

- from the short story "Resurrection — Victor Fernando R. Ocampo

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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

Okri Quotes By Ben Okri

Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities. — Ben Okri

Okri Quotes By 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