Ben Okri Quotes

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.

We must look at ourselves differently. We are freer than we think. We haven't begun to live yet. The man whose light has come on in his head, in his dormant sun, can never be kept down or defeated. We can redream this world and make the dream real. Human beings are gods hidden from ourselves.

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

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.

What if by sheer repetition we become the person we most often pretend to be? Does that mean there is no authentic self? Are we made of habits, compressed by time, like layered rocks?

When you make sense of something, it tends to disappear. It is only mystery which keeps things alive

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

In that land of beginnings spirits mingled with the unborn. We could assume numerous forms. Many of us were birds. We knew no boundaries. There was much feasting, playing, and sorrowing. We feasted much because of the beautiful terrors of eternity. We played much because we were free. And we sorrowed much because there were always those amongst us who had just returned from the world of the Living. They had returned inconsolable for all the love they had left behind, all the suffering they hadn't redeemed, all that they hadn't understood, and for all that they had barely begun to learn before they were drawn back to the land of origins.

I was happy for him. He did not have a sunken molue in his brain. Rastafarians and diseased children didn’t torment him. He hadn’t been a salesman of nightmares- he had only ever been their administrator.

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

inverse of the word live is evil.

A flamenco dancer, lurking under a shadow, prepares of the terror of her dance. Somebody has wounded her with words, alluding to the fact that she has no fire, or ‘duende’. She knows she has to dance her way past her limitations, and that this may destroy her forever. She has to fail, or she has to die. I want to dwell for a little while on this dancer because, though a very secular example, she speaks very well for the power of human transcendence. I want you to imagine this frail woman. I want you to see her in deep shadow, and fear. When the music starts, she begins to dance, with ritual slowness. Then she stamps out the dampness from her soul. Then she stamps fire into her loins. She takes on a strange enchanted glow. With a dark tragic rage, shouting, she hurls her hungers, her doubts, her terrors, and her secular prayer for more light into the spaces around her. All fire and fate, she spins her enigma around us, and pulls into the awesome risk of her dance.

She is taking herself apart before our sceptical gaze.

She is disintegrating, shouting and stamping and dissolving the boundaries of her body. Soon, she becomes a wild unknown force, glowing in her death, dancing from her wound, dying in her dance.

And when she stops – strangely gigantic in her new fiery stature – she is like one who has survived the most dangerous journey of all. I can see her now as she stands shining in celebration of her own death. In the silence that follows, no one moves. The fact is that she has destroyed us all.

Why do I dwell on this dancer? I dwell on her because she represents for me the courage to go beyond ourselves. While she danced she became the dream of the freest and most creative people we had always wanted to be, in whatever it is we do. She was the sea we never ran away to, the spirit of wordless self-overcoming we never quite embrace. She destroyed us because we knew in our hearts that rarely do we rise to the higher challenges in our lives, or our work, or our hum

Things she had said started to come back to him. How she out-stared a snake in the backyard. How the soldiers would stop buses and commandeer a woman at the slightest whim. How one day, as she was daydreaming in the office, three male-spirits came in through the walls and, with their heads facing backwards, tried to force her to make love to them.

The historian deals with the past, but the true storyteller works with the future. You can tell the strength of an age by the imaginative truth-grasping vigour of its storytellers. Stories are matrices of thought. They are patterns formed in the mind. They weave their effect on the future. To be a storyteller is to work with, to weave with, the material of time itself.

I kept looking forward the answer to things. I kept looking, and I never saw, and I became lost. I lost myself, lost my own reality.