Life & Wisdom Quote by Ben Okri

London shows up here less as a city than as a syllabus. Okri’s line is a compact confession of literary pilgrimage: he isn’t chasing Big Ben or British weather, he’s chasing an imagined capital built from sentences. “Home of literature” is deliberately possessive and a little audacious, because it names a canon as a place you can move into. For a Nigerian poet coming of age in the long afterlife of empire, that move carries friction. Dickens and Shakespeare aren’t neutral tour guides; they’re cultural gatekeepers whose work helped define Englishness and, by extension, who gets to speak “literature” in the first place.

The craft of the quote is in its plainness. Okri doesn’t dress the decision up as strategy or rebellion. He frames it as personal necessity (“for me”), which softens what could read as capitulation and turns it into a claim of agency: I chose this center because I was taught it was the center. The subtext, though, is that centers are made, not found. London becomes “home” through education, publishing, and prestige networks that historically flowed outward from Britain and inward from its former colonies.

Dickens and Shakespeare also signal range: social realism and mythic drama, the city’s grime and the stage’s grandeur. Okri aligns himself with both, hinting at his own project - to absorb the tradition and then bend it, making London less a shrine than a workshop. The sentence is admiration with an edge: a reminder that colonial inheritance can be intoxicating, and still something you have to rewrite to survive.