Love Quote by Ben Okri

Okri’s line treats storytelling less like entertainment and more like a technology of courage: not a sword that kills fear, but a force that outgrows it. “Conquer” is blunt, almost martial, yet he immediately softens the claim with “you know,” a small, intimate tag that shifts the voice from proclamation to shared wisdom. It’s persuasion by closeness. He’s not arguing; he’s reminding you of something your body already recognizes from childhood, from myth, from hearing a voice in the dark.

The subtext is that fear is partly a failure of imagination. Panic narrows the world to a tunnel of threat; stories widen the frame. They offer rehearsal space for terror and loss, but with structure, meaning, and the possibility of transformation. That’s why the second sentence lands harder: “They can make the heart bigger.” Bigger isn’t moral perfection; it’s capacity. More room for contradiction, for empathy, for staying present when the easy move is to shut down. Okri’s insistence isn’t that stories distract us from reality, but that they train us to meet it without becoming smaller.

Context matters: Okri’s work, especially The Famished Road, is steeped in West African storytelling traditions and political pressure-cooker realities, where the surreal isn’t escapism so much as a way to name what ordinary language can’t safely or adequately hold. In that light, “stories” become a communal practice of survival: a means to metabolize violence, uncertainty, and power without letting them dictate the size of the self.