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

Ben Okri

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
The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
BEN OKRI

Attention Common Magic
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.
BEN OKRI

Individual Secret Stories
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI

Art Magic Nothing
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
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
BEN OKRI

Karma Law Simple
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
BEN OKRI

Order Smile Squares
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
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
BEN OKRI

Dream Mean Reality
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
I was going to be a scientist.
BEN OKRI

Dream Going Job Scientist
Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
BEN OKRI

Checks Everyone Read Reading
I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
BEN OKRI

Homeless Miserable Wit
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.
BEN OKRI

Birds Fish Inside Magic Strange
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
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
BEN OKRI

Country Home Literature

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

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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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