I know that human beings are capable of anything.
BEN OKRIThe Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest.
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I’m conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There’s hardly a day that goes past on which I don’t write poetry.
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If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft
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I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.
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In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It’s just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there.
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Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
BEN OKRI