Ben Okri
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Ben Okri OBE FRSL (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian poet and novelist.
Quotes[edit]
- 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.
- 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.
- Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.
The Famished Road (1991)[edit]
- 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.
- This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
- A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
- 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.
- A dream can be the highest point of a life
- 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.
A Way of Being Free (1998)[edit]
- What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings? The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one's place in the world - a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things.
- 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.
Birds of Heaven (2010)[edit]
- If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.
- 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, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.
- Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories
