Quotes from Ben Okri

Her eyes were narrowed as if they were endlessly trying to exclude most of what they saw.

It was a night replaying its corrosive recurrence on the road of our lives, on the road which was hungry for great transformations.

The historian deals with the past, but the true storyteller works with the future. You can tell the strength of an age by the imaginative truth-grasping vigour of its storytellers. Stories are matrices of thought. They are patterns formed in the mind. They weave their effect on the future. To be a storyteller is to work with, to weave with, the material of time itself.

The dead shook off their rust of living and seized up steel. Their lips quivered with the defiance of innocents, with manipulations of politicians and their interchangeable dreams, and with the insanity of thugs who don't even know for which parties they commit their atrocities.

His mind had been unhinged by the blast of detonators, nights spent with corpses and by the superstitious incredulity of having killed so many white men.

I was born not just because I had conceived a notion to stay, but because in between my coming and going the great cycles of time had finally tightened around my neck. I prayed for laughter, a life without hunger. I was answered with paradoxes. It remains an enigma how it came to be that I was born smiling.

The only power that black people have is their hunger.

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.

People who use only their eyes do not SEE. People who use only their ears do not HEAR. It is more difficult to love than to die. It is not death that human beings are most afraid of, it is love. The heart is bigger than a mountain. One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mightly plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls.

Dad had crossed the desert of his exhaustion, had found new springs and oases of energies.

You're looking at me, chair,' he said. 'You don't want me to sit on you, eh, because I fell in mud, isn't that correct?' The chair said nothing.

If they are awake while everyone else was sleeping, what on earth were they doing?

He didn't look depressed. He had a careful three-day growth of beard. His beard was not depressed either. But you never can tell.

You take every day for granted. That for you is real. But if you stop taking it for granted it becomes unreal. Unreality makes the work real. If you remember how unreal the world is, you will be fine

I showed you that it is unreality that makes the world real. ' 'I don't understand' 'You take every day for granted. That for you is real. But if you stop taking it for granted it becomes unreal. Unreality makes the world real. If you remember how unreal the world is, you will be fine

When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.

Besides, you are seeking something you have already found but don't knoit. Such are the causes of unhappiness.

Besides, you are seeking something you have already found, but don't know it. Such are the causes of unhappiness.

Ade wanted to leave, to become a spirit again, free in the captivity of freedom. I wanted the liberty of limitations, to have to find or create new roads from this one which is so hungry, this road of our refusal to be.

She moved in cadenzas of golden light. She floated on the wind of a royal serenity.

Learning what you know is something you have to do every day and every moment.

And he remembered only because he didn't want to have to go through it all over again, making all the mistakes of his confusion.

When you make sense of something, it tends to disappear. It is only mystery which keeps things alive

We could hear her voice, speaking of a perplexing era to come, sounding from the distance. Her voice quivered on the night air, confusing her precise location. She could have been rattling the doors to our ears from a hundred different places in the living wound of our area.