Ben Okri Quotes

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.

When the candle burned low, and the rats began to eat, I would put out the light and lie awake in the dark. I would listen to Mum and Dad snoring on the bed. Sometimes when I fell asleep a lighter part of me rose up from my body and floated in the dark. A bright light, which I could not see, but which I could feel, surrounded me. I would be lifted out of my body, would find it difficult to get out through the roof, and would be brought down suddenly by the noise of the rats eating. Then I would sleep soundly. One night I managed to lift myself out through the roof. I went up at breathtaking speed and stars fell from me. Unable to control my motion, I rose and fell and went in all directions, spinning through incredible peaks and vortexes. Dizzy and turning, swirling and dancing, the darkness seemed infinite, without signs, without markings. I rose without getting to heaven. I soared blissfully and I understood something of the inhuman exultation of flight.

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick.

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

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.

An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.

As he walked though, listening to his happy footfalls, he felt the world telling him to stop looking, for then he would see beyond; to stop thinking, for then he would comprehend; to stop trying to make sense of things, for then he would find the truest grace.

And he remembered only because he didn't want to have to go through it all over again, making all the mistakes of his confusion.

We must take an interest in politics. We must become spies on behalf of justice.

I also knew that because he was safely on the right side, the strongest side, he would never understand what it was like to live with seven corpses in your dreams, to live with women eaten by ringworm, or children bursting with stomach worms.

Apart from a mark on my palm I had managed to avoid being discovered. It may simply have been that I had grown tired of coming and going. It is terrible to forever remain in-between.

People who use only their eyes do not SEE. People who use only their ears do not HEAR. It is more difficult to love than to die. It is not death that human beings are most afraid of, it is love. The heart is bigger than a mountain. One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mightly plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls.

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

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.

And the enchanted silences converged there too from all realms. And each of the silences also had infinite possibilities and magnification without end. He could have lived in any of the silences for a millennium and not exhausted its mystery. Each of the silences, vast and serene, like a moment on the highest mountain, or a gentle breeze within a mirror, permeated the room, and dwelled at ease with all the others. The silences came from mountaintops covered with snow and the depths of unfathomed oceans, from the face of the moon and the forests at night, from the stalagmites of green caves and the axis of constellations, from human beings in their lonely places and beings in their higher spaces, from the dreams of a newborn babe and the first moments of emerging flowers, from angels and diamonds, from the heart of Time and the languid countrysides, from the hidden dimensions and the hidden heaven, from all the dead and all whose hearts quicken to the highest love, the silences came, and they passed through him, and they altered no spaces, and he noticed how real the room of meditations was for such dancing eternities.