One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’
BEN OKRII’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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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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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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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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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I’m conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There’s hardly a day that goes past on which I don’t write poetry.
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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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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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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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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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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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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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Our time here is magic! It’s the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It’s the only space.
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What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
BEN OKRI