A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
BEN OKRIPeople 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
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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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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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We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
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Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes.
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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.
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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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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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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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The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.
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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.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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