When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
BEN OKRIBad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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I’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.
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The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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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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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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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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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 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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To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they
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When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.
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The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
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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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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
BEN OKRI