Happiness Quote by Ben Okri

Okri compresses an entire coming-of-age myth into a single breathless inventory, and the craft is in how he refuses to tidy it up. The repeated “lived” is a drumbeat of survival, but it’s also a refusal of glamor: no heroic montage, just the blunt mechanics of where a body ends up when money and stability run out. “By my wits” signals improvisation, intelligence as currency, but it carries a shadow charge too: wit is what you spend when you don’t have anything else, and spending it can be exhausting.

The pivot from logistics (“homeless,” “streets,” “friends’ floors”) to feeling (“happy,” “miserable”) is the subtextual punch. Okri doesn’t narrate a clean ascent from hardship to wisdom; he insists that joy and despair can coexist inside the same unstable life. That’s a subtle rebuke to the cultural appetite for inspirational poverty stories, the kind that retroactively turn deprivation into a character-building exercise. His syntax denies that comfort.

As a poet associated with a porous, dreamlike realism, Okri often treats reality as layered: the seen and the felt, the material and the metaphysical. This line lands in that register while staying concrete. “Friends’ floors” is intimate and unromantic, a detail that implies community as both safety net and fragile dependency. The intent feels less like confession than calibration: a reminder that artistic identity is often forged in conditions that are not picturesque, and that the emotional record of survival is never singular.