Don’t despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.
BEN OKRIDon’t despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. … That’s what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.
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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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Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.
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One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’
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We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
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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.
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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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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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People that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.
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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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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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An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
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The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
BEN OKRI







