Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
BEN OKRIMaybe 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
-
-
We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
BEN OKRI -
Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
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 -
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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 -
Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
BEN OKRI -
Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.
BEN OKRI -
We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.
BEN OKRI -
Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train.
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 -
Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
BEN OKRI -
I’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.
BEN OKRI -
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI -
We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It’s just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there.
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