Ben Okri Quotes

We create stories to define our existence. If we do not create the stories, we probably go mad.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

You may have heard the world is made up of atoms and molecules, but it's really made up of stories. When you sit with an individual that's been here, you can give quantitative data a qualitative overlay.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath.

To survive, you must tell stories.

The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked, the right way and the way that was not so right.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

This is one of the reasons I'm so interested in stories. Because everyone has a story in their life, and when their story doesn't make sense, that's when we get depressed, I think.

There is only one type of story in the world-your story.

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.

Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

We don’t attach to things; we attach to our stories about them.

As human beings, the closest we can get to truth is through story.

I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?

Human beings. People's stories. That's really what gets me excited.

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.

I suppose the other thing too many forget is that we were all stories once, each and every one of us. And we remain stories. But too often we allow those stories to grow banal, or cruel or unconnected to each other.We allow the stories to continue, but they no longer have a heart. They no longer sustain us.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.

It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping: our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don't like to admit it, sometimes it's the only thing.

Story, finally, is humanity's autobiography.

You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.