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 OKRIOne human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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.
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If we are true, if we can love, if we have vision, if we can have courage, we can, we should, we ought to, we will.
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Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.
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The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.
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I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories
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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
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When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.
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Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they’ll only see their narrow range reflected in it.
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The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
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Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you’ve got left is your belief in the imagination.
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To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they
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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.
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