Ben Okri
Ben Okri
Ben Okri OBE FRSLis 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...
NationalityNigerian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth15 March 1959
CountryNigeria
humans human-beings knows
I know that human beings are capable of anything.
fighting people share
I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
law police world
The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
dancer spirit afraid-to-love
If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.
country character ghetto
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.
stories world converting
The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
fear heart stories
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
ignorance simple parent
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.
dream highest
a dream can be the highest point of a life
dream real world
We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.
art creativity impossible
Creativity is the art of the impossible
fathers-day courage adversity
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.
fighting people pace
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.
mad silence stories
Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories