Ben Okri Quotes

"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."

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.

You’re looking at me, chair,’ he said. ‘You don’t want me to sit on you, eh, because I fell in mud, isn’t that correct?’

The chair said nothing.

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

Will you be at the harvest,
Among the gatherers of new fruits?

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

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.

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’.

Ade wanted to leave, to become a spirit again, free in the captivity of freedom. I wanted the liberty of limitations, to have to find or create new roads from this one which is so hungry, this road of our refusal to be.

"That's good. Life is full of riddles that only the dead can answer," was Dad's reply.

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.

Don't read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.

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.

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.

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