Ben Okri Quotes

They made me think. Everything has to fight to live. Rats work very hard. If we are not careful they will inherit the earth.

Her father's books were not read in a normal way. Some of them were read with the hands. Some were read by placing them at the centre of the forehead. One of the books could only be read with eyes closed. Another one could only be read in dreams, while the reader was asleep, with the book under the pillow.

There was a very special book of her father's which could only be read by the dead. It was placed in their coffins, over the heart.

There was one book that was only read by drinking. Water was poured on its waterproof pages and the water was drunk. The words filled out in the blood and heart and brains, till the reader became the words.

There was another special book that was read in the wind. The book was left dangling, the wind blew its pages, and the reader, with the light on their face, read the words which the wind dispersed.

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.

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.

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.

Things she had said started to come back to him. How she out-stared a snake in the backyard. How the soldiers would stop buses and commandeer a woman at the slightest whim. How one day, as she was daydreaming in the office, three male-spirits came in through the walls and, with their heads facing backwards, tried to force her to make love to them.

Here are some thoughts to replace the ones that have been knocked away. Do you want to hear them?’
‘Yes.’
The voice coughed and began:
‘Even the good things in life eventually poison you. There are three kinds of sounds, two kinds of shadows, one gourd for every cracked head, and seven boreholes for those that climb too high. There is an acid in the feel of things. There is a fire which does not burn, but which dissolves the flesh like common salt. The bigger mouth eats the smaller head. The wind blows back to us what we have blown away. There are several ways to burn your own fire. There is a particular sound which indicates trouble is coming. And your thoughts are merely the footsteps of you tramping round the disaster area of your own mind.

Her sigh was full of despair, but at the bottom of her lungs, at the depth of her breath's expulsion, there was also hope, waiting like sleep at the end of even the most torrid day.

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.

Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

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

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.

If they are awake while everyone else was sleeping, what on earth were they doing?

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.

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.