Ben Okri Quotes

Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.

The only power that black people have is their hunger.

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

Wars are not fought on battlegrounds but in a space smaller than the head of a needle.

I showed you that it is unreality that makes the world real. ‘
‘I don’t understand’
‘You take every day for granted. That for you is real.
But if you stop taking it for granted it becomes unreal. Unreality makes the world real. If you remember how unreal the world is, you will be fine

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

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

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

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’.

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.

A week later another woman did the same thing. She stripped naked and ran through the streets singing. But that day changed the history of the world. For the police chased after the woman, caught up with her and, in full public view, ate her raw. They tore her flesh and drank her blood and ate chunks of her buttocks and gorged themselves on her bones.

After that a new madness came among the people.

At night, in a restless neighborhood, someone might be heard screaming. Those who looked out of the window saw a white van appear outside the house. An hour later men in uniformed would be seen emerging from the house with blood on their faces and blood and gristle on their shirts as if they had been feasting on raw wild animals. The next day nothing but the cracked skull and long bones of the victim were seen in the bedroom.

A new stage in the elimination of undesirables had been reached.

She understood that the truth of things was upside down. She grasped that those who thought they knew were ignorant, that those who thought they had power were powerless, and that those who thought they knew themselves were in great darkness.

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

There are many reasons why babies cry when they are born, and one of them is the sudden separation from the world of pure dreams, where all things are made of enchantment, and where there is no suffering.

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.