Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train.
BEN OKRII was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
BEN OKRI -
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.
BEN OKRI -
When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
BEN OKRI -
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
BEN OKRI -
The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
BEN OKRI -
People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
BEN OKRI -
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.
BEN OKRI -
Don’t despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.
BEN OKRI -
Maybe there are only three kinds of stories: those we live, those we tell, and those that help our souls fly upwards to a greater life.
BEN OKRI -
One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.
BEN OKRI -
The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.
BEN OKRI -
We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.
BEN OKRI -
A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation… Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.
BEN OKRI -
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
BEN OKRI -
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
BEN OKRI