A compilation of 31 Powerful Ben Okri quotes.
Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet and novelist who was born on March 15, 1959. Okri is regarded as one of the most important African authors of the post-modern and post-colonial periods. Okri won the Booker Prize in 1991 for his novel The Famished Road.
Okri’s writing career began in 1980, when he released his debut novel Flowers and Shadows at the age of 21. From 1983 to 1986, he was the poetry editor of West Africa magazine, and between 1983 and 1985, he was a frequent contributor to the BBC World Service.
Ben Okri Quotes
- “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.”
2. “We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.”
3. “A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.”
4. “We must take an interest in politics. We must become spies on behalf of justice.”
5. “There are many reasons why babies cry when they are born, and one of them is the sudden separation from the world of pure dreams, where all things are made of enchantment, and where there is no suffering.”
6. “The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.”
7. “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.”
8. “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.”
9. “Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories.”
10. “Understanding is a pure glass of water. All great truths have no taste. Hints of sweetness are coloured by the need for amazement.”
Short Ben Okri Quotes
11. “Some of my reactions are very Nigerian. I still believe that words are things.”
12. “If You Look Too Deeply Everything Breaks Your Heart.”
13. “I know that human beings are capable of anything.”
14. “An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.”
15. “The only power poor people have is their hunger.”
16. “a dream can be the highest point of a life”
17. “This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.”
18. “Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.”
19. “I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.”
20. “Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.”
Read More Ben Okri Quotes
21. “What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.”
22. “We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.”
23. “Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.”
24. “Don’t fear. You will always have something to struggle for, even if it is beauty or joy.”
25. “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.”
26. “I am one year older than Nigeria at 51. In a human life, 51 might be old. But it is very young for a nation. By that, I mean a Nigeria conscious of itself as a nation.”
27. “Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.”
28. “When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.”
29. “The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.”
30. “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.”
31. “To me Black Consciousness means equality, freedom, community, grassroot transformation, but it also means excellence, humanity, foresight, wisdom, and a transcendence of our weakness and our flaws.”