Ben Okri Quotes

An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.

A dream can be the highest point of a life.

Naturally, the quality of language changed. Certain words became suspicious and vanished from public life. Words like 'hope', 'rights', 'truth'. Anyone heard uttering those words found empty spaces around them. It wasn't long before anyone using the word 'freedom' was suspected of harbouring dangerous intentions.

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.

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

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 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.

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

We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.

The thoughts converged there from all realms. Ad each thought had infinite possibilities. He could have dwelled in any single one of those magical thoughts for a lifetime and to realised its full potential.

He felt as if he hadn't slept because he spent all night wandering through the world looking for a maiden who bore his heart in her womb. His heart grew in her like a child. He was pregnant with his heart for a long time, for a year, for ten years, for a generation, for a hundred and two years. His heart grew bigger and bigger in her, and she grew bigger and bigger to accomodate the growth of his heart in her womb. He never knew when she would give birth to his heart and he lost her and searched the world over and never found her. His father, the king, told him that the world in which he searched for he was his heart, and that she was the mother of all the world, and that his search was over when it began, but he didn't know it.