Ben Okri Quotes

92 quotes in 1331 categories

• Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
• To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. ... That's what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind,…
• 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…
• Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras,…
• 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…
• The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we…
• Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
• 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…
• The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world.…
• I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has…
• 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…
• 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…
• I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and…
• Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.
• Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
• 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…
• Creativity is the art of the impossible
• People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
• I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
• I know that human beings are capable of anything.

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