Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest.
BEN OKRIThe greatest religions convert the world through stories.
More Ben Okri Quotes
-
-
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.
BEN OKRI -
To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. … That’s what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.
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 -
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 -
The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
BEN OKRI -
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
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 -
I know that human beings are capable of anything.
BEN OKRI -
There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
BEN OKRI -
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI -
One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’
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 -
We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
BEN OKRI -
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.
BEN OKRI -
The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it
BEN OKRI