Ben Okri Quotes

We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.

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

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.

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.

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

Nothing is more difficult than knowing what you really think.

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 work real. If you remember how unreal the world is, you will be fine

The only power poor people have is their hunger.

And the enchanted silences converged there too from all realms. And each of the silences also had infinite possibilities and magnification without end. He could have lived in any of the silences for a millennium and not exhausted its mystery. Each of the silences, vast and serene, like a moment on the highest mountain, or a gentle breeze within a mirror, permeated the room, and dwelled at ease with all the others. The silences came from mountaintops covered with snow and the depths of unfathomed oceans, from the face of the moon and the forests at night, from the stalagmites of green caves and the axis of constellations, from human beings in their lonely places and beings in their higher spaces, from the dreams of a newborn babe and the first moments of emerging flowers, from angels and diamonds, from the heart of Time and the languid countrysides, from the hidden dimensions and the hidden heaven, from all the dead and all whose hearts quicken to the highest love, the silences came, and they passed through him, and they altered no spaces, and he noticed how real the room of meditations was for such dancing eternities.

It is easier to get lost within sight of the palace. [...] Hope makes all things near, and so can prove treacherous.

For your reflections reflect on the things you do. And the things you do reflect on you.

Her legend, which would sprout a thousand hallucinations, had been born in our midst – born of stories and rumours which, in time, would become some of the most extravagant realities of our lives.