People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
BEN OKRIWho knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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.
BEN OKRI -
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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What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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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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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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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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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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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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The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
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Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.
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We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.
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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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We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
BEN OKRI