To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
BEN OKRIPeople 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
-
-
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 -
I 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.
BEN OKRI -
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
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 -
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI -
Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
BEN OKRI -
You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.
BEN OKRI -
The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
BEN OKRI -
What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings?
BEN OKRI -
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
BEN OKRI -
Creativity is the art of the impossible
BEN OKRI -
Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
BEN OKRI -
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
BEN OKRI -
Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
BEN OKRI -
If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft
BEN OKRI