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If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.

Ben Okri

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
BEN OKRI

Attention Common Magic
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
BEN OKRI

Jazz Past Together
Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories
BEN OKRI

Mad Silence Stories
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.
BEN OKRI

Create History People Protected Transformer
The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
BEN OKRI

Facts Hint Perfection
One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
BEN OKRI

Adversity Father Tranquil
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI

Art Hide Magic Nothing
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.
BEN OKRI

Hungry Rivers World
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.
BEN OKRI

Circles Past Writing
Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
BEN OKRI

Checks Everyone Read Reading
We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
BEN OKRI

Definitions Destination Require Stop
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.
BEN OKRI

Realizing Suffering World
Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they’ll only see their narrow range reflected in it.
BEN OKRI

Book Reading Writing
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI

Art Magic Nothing
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.
BEN OKRI

Destiny Dream Fate
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

Around Destiny Expected Riddle Way

If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.

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If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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