Ben Okri Quotes

To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.

An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.

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

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.

One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.

The greatest religions convert the world through stories.

People 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.

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.