Ben Okri Quotes

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.

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.

So books should be lived to be read.
And life should be dreamt to be lived.

I believe that story changes reality.

Her sigh was full of despair, but at the bottom of her lungs, at the depth of her breath's expulsion, there was also hope, waiting like sleep at the end of even the most torrid day.

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.

Her legend, which would sprout a thousand hallucinations, had been born in our midst – born of stories and rumours which, in time, would become some of the most extravagant realities of our lives.

I was born not just because I had conceived a notion to stay, but because in between my coming and going the great cycles of time had finally tightened around my neck. I prayed for laughter, a life without hunger. I was answered with paradoxes. It remains an enigma how it came to be that I was born smiling.

Besides, you are seeking something you have already found, but don't know it. Such are the causes of unhappiness.

A dream can be the highest point of a life.

Do you know what the luckiest thing is?’
‘No.’
‘It is to be at home everywhere.

Our society is a battlefield. Poverty, corruption and hunger are the bullets. Bad governments are the bombs.

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.

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

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