Ben Okri

The dead shook off their rust of living and seized up steel. Their lips quivered with the defiance of innocents, with manipulations of politicians and their interchangeable dreams, and with the insanity of thugs who don't even know for which parties they commit their atrocities.

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

A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

Learn to drink, my son. A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest. Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes.

We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.

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.

Centuries of being attached to the machine had atrophied the languages of the earth.

"How many times had I come and gone through the dreaded gateway? How many times had I been born and died young? And how often to the same parents? I had no idea. So much of the dust of living was in me. But this time, somewhere in the interspace between the spirit world and the Living, I chose to stay.

Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.

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.