Quotes from Ben Okri

As he walked though, listening to his happy footfalls, he felt the world telling him to stop looking, for then he would see beyond; to stop thinking, for then he would comprehend; to stop trying to make sense of things, for then he would find the truest grace.

I kept looking forward the answer to things. I kept looking, and I never saw, and I became lost. I lost myself, lost my own reality.

Because you rejected my love, this is my curse on you. Refusing to love an illusion, you will have to love without illusion.

The thoughts converged there from all realms. Ad each thought had infinite possibilities. He could have dwelled in any single one of those magical thoughts for a lifetime and to realised its full potential.

I went about the market confused by many voices that could have been Mum's, many faces that could have been hers, and I saw that her tiredness and sacrifice were not hers alone but were suffered by all women, all women of the marketplace.

Her sigh was full of despair, but at the bottom of her lungs, at the depth of her breath's expulsion, there was also hope, waiting like sleep at the end of even the most torrid day.

We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see. Our

Centuries of being attached to the machine had atrophied the languages of the earth.

So books should be lived to be read. And life should be dreamt to be lived.

I believe that story changes reality.

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.

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.

This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.

The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.

One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.

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.

a dream can be the highest point of a life

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

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.

Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.

If You Look Too Deeply Everything Breaks Your Heart.

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

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. Don't try and press it down. Don't hide from it. Don't escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That's the way life goes.