159 Quotes by Ben Okri

I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.

In a world where no one listens, where no one seems to care, where hatred is greater than love, where hearts are hardened by vengeance and pride, where violence is preferable to peace, what else is there for him to do but heal the wounded, and bury the dead, in a war that could go on forever?

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

Nothing is more difficult than knowing what you really think.

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 spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.

If You Look Too Deeply Everything Breaks Your Heart.

The antimony on their features was set on silvery fire by the intensity of the moon. And their bodies, solid and quivering and half-naked, were like ancient memories of a mystical time without boundaries when it was possible to enter the consciousness of a cornseed and foretell the harvest to come.

That’s good. Life is full of riddles that only the dead can answer,” was Dad’s reply.

When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.