black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

Ben Okri

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 OKRI

Grief Miracle Suffering
Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
BEN OKRI

Artist Broken Enemy
I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
BEN OKRI

Homeless Miserable Wit
Literature doesn’t have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.
BEN OKRI

Character Country Ghetto
I know that human beings are capable of anything.
BEN OKRI

Capable Humans Knows
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

Realizing Suffering World
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
BEN OKRI

Jazz Past Together
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.
BEN OKRI

Power Should Vision
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

Another Ourselves Planted Unknowingly
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

Birds Fish Inside Magic Strange
Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.
BEN OKRI

Individual Secret Stories
This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.
BEN OKRI

Ocean People Stories
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
BEN OKRI

Fiction Humanity Mean
The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
BEN OKRI

Facts Hint Perfection
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI

Art Magic Nothing
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.
BEN OKRI

Ghetto Imagination Vibrancy

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ben Okri Quotes