Quotes from Ben Okri

Do you know what the luckiest thing is?' 'No.' 'It is to be at home everywhere.

Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.

Understanding is a pure glass of water. All great truths have no taste. Hints of sweetness are coloured by the need for amazement.

What if by sheer repetition we become the person we most often pretend to be? Does that mean there is no authentic self? Are we made of habits, compressed by time, like layered rocks?

It is easier to get lost within sight of the palace. [...] Hope makes all things near, and so can prove treacherous.

We ought to step out of our old, hard casing. We think that we are one kind of people, when in fact we are always creating ourselves. We are not fixed. We are constantly becoming, constantly coming into being.

I noticed that in a corner, across from where they ate with such innocent relish, sitting forlorn and abandoned, was the ghost of their son. He had lost both of his arms, one side of his face was squashed, and both his eyes had burst. He had bluish wings. He was the saddest ghost in the house.

He saw the world in which black people always suffered and he didn't like it. He saw a world in which human beings suffered so needlessly from Antipodes to Equator, and he didn't like it either. He saw our people drowning in poverty, in famine, drought, in divisiveness and the blood of war. He saw our people always preyed upon by other powers, manipulated by the Western world, our history and achievements rigged out of existence.

We are victims of censorship within when we do not let ourselves think the thoughts which our flesh recoils from, or let conscience speak that which the heart feels to be unacceptable, or when we give ourselves excellent reasons for not participating in this grand drama of our interconnected lives.

Knowledge of self ought to be the great project of our lives. Knowing ourselves we will know others. Only by knowing ourselves can we begin to undo the madness we unleash on the world in our wars, our destruction of the environment, our divisions, our desire to dominate others, the poverty we create and exploit. Only through self-knowledge can we reverse the damage we do with all the worldly knowledge we have, which has been only a higher ignorance.

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick.

Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

Nothing is more difficult than knowing what you really think.

It is not death that human beings are most afraid of, it is love.

When we have made an experience or a chaos into a story we have transformed it, made sense of it, transmuted experience, domesticated the chaos.

That you see a star in the night sky does not mean that the star sees you. The universe does not mirror consciousness. Consciousness mirrors the universe.

Wars are not fought on battlegrounds but in a space smaller than the head of a needle.

There are many reasons why babies cry when they are born, and one of them is the sudden separation from the world of pure dreams, where all things are made of enchantment, and where there is no suffering.

But to hear Mozart in a bombed city: how much more beautiful it sounds, as if it were composed to somehow soothe the ruins, to promise a wiser future rising from the rubble.

Her legend, which would sprout a thousand hallucinations, had been born in our midst – born of stories and rumours which, in time, would become some of the most extravagant realities of our lives.

Is there anything more real than what we have created in our minds?

Vivere è una continua metamorfosi. Ogni cosa è cambiamento; ogni cosa è relativa.

We must take an interest in politics. We must become spies on behalf of justice.

Will you be at the harvest, Among the gatherers of new fruits?