Ben Okri Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Ben Okri's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Poet Ben Okri's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 4 quotes on this page collected since March 15, 1959! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • I was born left-handed, but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing 'Famished Road,' which was very long, I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed, so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser, so later on I had to change it.

    Stress   Writing   Hands  
  • Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

    Art   Magic  
    Ben Okri (2014). “A Way of Being Free”, p.69, Head of Zeus
  • When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.

    Ben Okri (2014). “Astonishing the Gods”, Head of Zeus
  • To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they

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

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

    "Ben Okri: My family values" by Juliet Rix, www.theguardian.com. June 25, 2010.
  • The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

    Karma   Simple   Law  
    Ben Okri (2014). “Astonishing the Gods”, Head of Zeus
  • 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.

  • Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

    Asylums   Cases   Planets  
    Ben Okri (2009). “Tales of Freedom”, p.90, Random House
  • It may be that what you could be haunts you. It is real. It is a weight you have to carry around. Each failure to become, to be, is a weight. Each state you could inhabit is a burden as heavy as any physical weight, but more so, because it weighs on your soul. It is the ghost of your possibilities hanging around your neck, an invisible albatros, potentials unknowingly murdered.

    Real   Soul   Necks  
  • Maybe 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.

    Soul   Three   Stories  
  • To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.

  • What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

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

    Inspiring   Night   Water  
  • Our time here is magic! It's the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It's the only space.

  • 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. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.

    Dream   Fate   Destiny  
    Ben Okri (2014). “Astonishing the Gods”, Head of Zeus
  • The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.

    Past   Together   Jazz  
    "Magical Ben Okri casts a spell on his readers". Interview with Nima Elbagir, edition.cnn.com. June 28, 2011.
  • 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 (2014). “Astonishing the Gods”, Head of Zeus
  • 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 (2012). “Mental Fight”, p.39, Random House
  • The road will never swallow you. The river of destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger. Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.

    Fate   Destiny   Rivers  
  • 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 salutes Jeremy Corbyn in poetry with A New Dream of Politics" by Maev Kennedy, www.theguardian.com. October 12, 2015.
  • We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.

    "The Famished Road". Book by Ben Okri, 1991.
  • Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.

    Gold   Yards   Neglect  
  • Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.

  • 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.

    Ocean   People   Stories  
  • A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.

    Heart   People   Mad  
  • It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.

    "Magical Ben Okri casts a spell on his readers". Interview with Nima Elbagir, edition.cnn.com. June 28, 2011.
  • What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings? The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one's place in the world - a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things.

    Beautiful   Reality   Gun  
  • 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.

    Book   Reading   Writing  
  • It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of your mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

    Night   Self   Water  
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We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 4 quotes from the Poet Ben Okri, starting from March 15, 1959! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!