Astonishing the Gods Quotes

“The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“I love your silence. It is so wise. It listens. It invites warmth. I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you. You have the loneliness that all true heroes have, a loneliness that is a deep sea, within which the fishes of mystery dwell. I love your quest. It is noble. It has greatness in it. Only one who is born under a blessed star would set sail across the billowing waves and the wild squalls, because of a dream. I love your dream. It is magical. Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the world, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of thing, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“I kept looking forward the answer to things. I kept looking, and I never saw, and I became lost. I lost myself, lost my own reality.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“When we yearn, our yearning comes through from deep below. It comes from a deep remembering, from the forgotten dreams of our mingled ancestry. You are my yearning. And this is the night, long ago, when our stars first met. They are together now, in the heavens, shedding a beautiful radiance on this night. They are weaving enchantments for us so that we may step through the invisible mirror in the air and enter the fairy-tale we are meant to live, but which we forgot.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“The thoughts converged there from all realms. Ad each thought had infinite possibilities. He could have dwelled in any single one of those magical thoughts for a lifetime and to realised its full potential.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“Because you rejected my love, this is my curse on you. Refusing to love an illusion, you will have to love without illusion.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“As he walked though, listening to his happy footfalls, he felt the world telling him to stop looking, for then he would see beyond; to stop thinking, for then he would comprehend; to stop trying to make sense of things, for then he would find the truest grace.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“When you make sense of something, it tends to disappear. It is only mystery which keeps things alive”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“And he remembered only because he didn't want to have to go through it all over again, making all the mistakes of his confusion.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“Learning what you know is something you have to do every day and every moment.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“Besides, you are seeking something you have already found, but don't know it. Such are the causes of unhappiness.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“And the enchanted silences converged there too from all realms. And each of the silences also had infinite possibilities and magnification without end. He could have lived in any of the silences for a millennium and not exhausted its mystery. Each of the silences, vast and serene, like a moment on the highest mountain, or a gentle breeze within a mirror, permeated the room, and dwelled at ease with all the others. The silences came from mountaintops covered with snow and the depths of unfathomed oceans, from the face of the moon and the forests at night, from the stalagmites of green caves and the axis of constellations, from human beings in their lonely places and beings in their higher spaces, from the dreams of a newborn babe and the first moments of emerging flowers, from angels and diamonds, from the heart of Time and the languid countrysides, from the hidden dimensions and the hidden heaven, from all the dead and all whose hearts quicken to the highest love, the silences came, and they passed through him, and they altered no spaces, and he noticed how real the room of meditations was for such dancing eternities.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods

“Besides, you are seeking something you have already found but don't knoit. Such are the causes of unhappiness.”
― Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods