The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
BEN OKRII lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they
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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.
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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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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.
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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.
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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
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a dream can be the highest point of a life
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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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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.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
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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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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.
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I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
BEN OKRI