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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

Ben Okri

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 know that human beings are capable of anything.
BEN OKRI

Capable Humans Knows
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.
BEN OKRI

Discovery Dream Exemptarty Stone Thing
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
BEN OKRI

Childhood Destiny Dream
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
The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.
BEN OKRI

Absolutely Reader Writing
We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
BEN OKRI

Enchanted Spirit Time
The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
BEN OKRI

Inspirational Love Sympathy
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI

Art Magic Nothing
Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
BEN OKRI

Checks Everyone Read Reading
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.
BEN OKRI

Escape Life Press Strange
The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
BEN OKRI

Converting Stories World
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.
BEN OKRI

Hungry Rivers World
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.
BEN OKRI

Law Police World
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 OKRI

Ghetto Imagination Vibrancy
I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
BEN OKRI

Fighting People Share

There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

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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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