#ben okri

[ijustkindalikebooks]

From the charity shop shelf.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jamie Wyeth :: Pumpkinhead, 1972

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“Dreams gather in black books: Coiled spaces, mixed up parables out of which looks the soul as it reads time. I travel the whole world with an uncomplicated rhyme. I feast in dreams, and fast in life; it seems that dreams transfigure strife.” — Ben Okri, in an excerpt from Nostalgia, featured in Wild

[blacclotusss]

9 People You'd Like to Get to Know Better

Thanks for the tag @beautyindiversity 💗

Three Ships:

Loumand/Armanlou (Interview with the Vampire (2022))

SydCarmy (The Bear)

Alex Claremont-Diaz/Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor (Red, White, & Royal Blue)

First Ship: Sambucky

Last Song: Wanna Be by GloRilla ft. Megan thee Stallion

Currently Reading: Flowers and Shadows by Ben Okri

Last Movie: Monkey Man

Currently Craving: Snickers Bar!

Gonna tag @sygoflyy @nakiaslilhoodoo @vfevermillion

[dk-thrive]

Beware the stories you read or tell: subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

— Ben Okri, from A Way of Being Free (Head of Zeus, March 12, 2015)

[litandlifequotes]

I love your silence. It is so wise. It listens.

Astonishing the Gods by Ben Okri

[keepcalmandwritefiction]

Storytellers ought not be too tame. They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society. They are best in disguise. If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys.

– Ben Okri

[manwalksintobar]

Ben Okri // The Void

I was talking to a builder of bridges and asked how he built the structure that brings two warring elements together. This was his answer. What is a bridge? A land divided, or the gap between? Most see a unity wrought through necessity and compromise, mutual respect, or cohabitation. But he was interested in the space separating these two lands that perhaps are one hope. And thinking of the vacuum made him forge a rare concept, one worthy of an old myth. He built a bridge that acknowledged the empty space. To walk that bridge is to feel the swaying danger of the wind and the heights, the howling drop. No one can walk the bridge without respect, holding on carefully to the ropes on either side, aware of the beauty and the depths and rocks, the pitiless desert all around. Its strangest feature is the gap that runs through the center. Neither half meet. The gap is for thermal expansion of the tough material. It’s not the two territories that deserve it, but the rage and the void between. That’s where history falls through. We need a new kind of bridge, not one that brings these irreconcilable peoples together but that reminds them every day into what emptiness they both can fall. And there is no end to that fall, not now or for all of history to come. Perhaps the madness will make them create the kind of bridge that has never been built before. Not a bridge of peace, but of a terror for a world in which peace can never be.

[juliansummerhayes]

“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.” ― Ben Okri

[silvermythago]

Be wild

"Storytellers ought not to be too tame. They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society. They are best in disguise. If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys."

- Ben Okri

[rthwrms]

“The thing about truths unfaced is that they grow. Truths unfaced, injustices undealt with and unconfronted- they become monsters. They don’t just sit down there and remain the same, they grow too, at an accelerated rate. As we grow, the more we unface something the bigger it gets. It doesn’t get smaller. If you not face it that means you’re adding to it every day which is to say not only is it growing but you are then adding to it. You’re increasing its power and its strength. Most of the things we have to face that you say are difficult, that now are monsters, were once very very small things that could have been faced in a moment of openness, in a moment of humanity, in a moment even of compassion, a sense of fairness. But for many reasons, could be reasons of selfishness, could be reasons of profit, could be reasons of wanting to have our people better than other people, have our tribe, to have people in our family better than others, whatever those reasons are, we don’t face them, we utter them, and they become monsters…So when you ask me why is it we don’t face things it’s because we’ve made a history- we’ve made an epic history- of not facing stuff. And most of the stuff we’ve not faced, we not faced for a thousand years. We’ve passed on our not facing to our children and to the next generation and it gets bigger and bigger and worse and worse…and these things become monsters.”

-- Ben Okri in "The Role of an Artist in Times of Crisis"

[wellconstructedsentences]

Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of your consciousness, they are altering your world.

Ben Okri

[inlovewithquotes]

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

-Ben Okri

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[from my flickr files]

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“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.” ― Ben Okri, The Famished Road

[hedgewitchgarden]

"Storytellers ought not to be too tame.  They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society.  They are best in disguise.  If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys."

~ Ben Okri

[iseetheworldinmetaphor]

There was no one amongst us who looked forward to being born. 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 we ever learn to see

The Famished Road, Ben Okri

[symptom3000]

Tony Allen "Cosmosis feat. Skepta, Ben Okri" (2021)

director: Navire Argo