Top Ben Okri Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Ben Okri Biography

Ben Okri OBE FRSL (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian poet and novelist. Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions, and has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez.

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Ben Okri Quotes

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 you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.

Children, Dream, Interested, Kids, Nigeria, Told

Yes, the highest things are beyond words. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.

Art, Dream, Enter, Moods, Spiritual, Yes

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

Life, Lose, Mad, Moorings, Silence, Stories

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

Come, Dream, Hidden, Human, Real, World

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.

Individual, Individuals, Reservoir, Secret, Stories

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, Fully, Gifts, Poison, Stories, Tells

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.

Writing, Reader, Writer

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

Adversity, Bores, Father, Unintentionally, Witnessing

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

Down, Grow, Grows, Life, Like, Wherever

One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man.

Adversity, Courage, Fathers Day, Rollercoaster, Unshaken

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. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it

Creative, Dream, Dreamed, Everything, Mean, Reality

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.

Continent, Dream, History, Ocean, Plants, Sky

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 was once a river it was always hungry.

Branched, Hungry, Rivers, Road, World

Don't read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.

Cautiously, Checks, Everyone, Read, Reading

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.

Existence, Human, Ignorance, Parent, Simple

People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.

Healthy, People, Stories, Tell

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 also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted — knowingly or unknowingly — in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives. ’

Age, Giving, Meaning, Meaning Of Life, Unknowingly

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, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.

Character, Creativity, Existence, Reading, Tool, Wouldnt

If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.

Afraid To Love, Dancer, Love, Pure, Spirit, Strength

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

Inventing, Reality, Stop, Things

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