black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.

Ben Okri

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
This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
BEN OKRI

Down Grows Like
Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
BEN OKRI

Inspiring Night Water
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
BEN OKRI

Childhood Destiny Dream
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.
BEN OKRI

Book Reading Writing
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

Dream Ocean Rocks
The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
BEN OKRI

Inspirational Love Sympathy
Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
BEN OKRI

Checks Everyone Read Reading
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
BEN OKRI

Karma Law Simple
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

Beautiful Despair Secret
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
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI

Art Hide Magic Nothing
When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
BEN OKRI

Chaos Deities Eras
The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
BEN OKRI

Converting Stories World
A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
BEN OKRI

Able Men Sometimes
I know that human beings are capable of anything.
BEN OKRI

Capable Humans Knows

I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ben Okri Quotes