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I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.

Ben Okri

Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
BEN OKRI

Asylums Cases Planet
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI

Art Hide Magic Nothing
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
Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you’ve got left is your belief in the imagination.
BEN OKRI

Ghetto Imagination Vibrancy
I was going to be a scientist.
BEN OKRI

Dream Going Job Scientist
I’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.
BEN OKRI

Life Reality Running
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.
BEN OKRI

Heart Mad People
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
BEN OKRI

Fiction Humanity Mean
I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
BEN OKRI

Children Dream Kids
The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.
BEN OKRI

Artist Imagination Secret
Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.
BEN OKRI

Dream Flower Strong
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
BEN OKRI

Inventing Reality Stop Thing
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
BEN OKRI

Fear Heart Telling Stories
Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.
BEN OKRI

Good Higher Success Surprise
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…
BEN OKRI

Fighting Heroism People
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
BEN OKRI

Childhood Destiny Dream

I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.

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I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ben Okri Quotes