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 OKRIThe law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings?
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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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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.
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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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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Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do.
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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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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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Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
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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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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it
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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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You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.
BEN OKRI -
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
BEN OKRI -
I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
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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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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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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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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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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
BEN OKRI