Ben Okri Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy... But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason... A love, inspired, it seems, by the gods, which it is impossible to fight, distort, destroy, or weaken. In fact, the attempts to destroy such loves only strengthen them. And to do nothing allows them to continue to grow at their natural pace, inexoribly, till this love becomes a wide and silent adoration.

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

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 of your mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

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

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

There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

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

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 an absolute reality.

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.

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

A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

The greatest religions convert the world through stories.

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.

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

The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled .. (they) helped the community live though one more darkness, with eyes wide open, and with hearts set alight.

Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.

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

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.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.