Ben Okri Quotes

I don't think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they're talking about the secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things," that nice old lady said to me. "Mr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him.

Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still-are.

...the larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart.

There is in every human being, I think, a native country of the mind, where, protected by inaccessible barriers, the sensitive dream life may exist safely.

I love the way she projects two facets: a visible persona and a subterranean one. She keeps her thoughts to herself; she seems to suggest that her secret, inner life is at least as significant as the appearance she gives.

...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.

I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.

Imagination places the future world for us either above or below or in reincarnation. We dream of travels throughout the universe: is not the universe within us? We do not know the depths of our spirit. The mysterious path leads within. In us, or nowhere, lies eternity with its worlds, the past and the future.

My favorite mode of communication is in the world beyond: a dream, to see in a dream. My second favorite is correspondence.

It's nice to dig deeper into people who may look one way but always have a story to tell. I obviously write about that a lot.

The inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers.

The sphere that is deepest, most unexplored, and most unfathomable, the wonder and glory of God's thought and hand, is our own soul!

The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.

Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.

Every arena of life intersects with what's going on in our hearts. Everything passes through on its way to wherever it's going. Everything.

These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past

I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world.

I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.

When I open my eyes to the outer world I feel myself as a drop in the sea. But when I close my eyes and look within, I see the whole universe as a bubble raised in the ocean of my heart.

The outer kingdom is not our real home. The inner kingdom is our everything.

There's a universe inside your head - a place of pictures and passions, of songs and sorrows. It's everything you are - and it's an utter mystery.

There are no watertight compartments in our inmost nature.

The interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.

Make no mistake, the woman had a heart. She had a bigger one that people would think. There was a lot in it, stored up, high in miles of hidden shelving. Remember that she was the woman with the instrument strapped to her body in the long, moon-slit night.

You are an ocean in a drop of dew, all the universes in a thin sack of blood. What are these pleasures then, these joys, these worlds that you keep reaching for, hoping they will make you more alive?