Literature doesn’t have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.
BEN OKRIWhen you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.
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Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
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When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.
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The 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.
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We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation… Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.
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Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.
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There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy… But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason…
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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories
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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
BEN OKRI