We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
BEN OKRIDon’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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
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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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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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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.
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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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Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories
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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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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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Don’t despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.
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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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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.
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Creativity is the art of the impossible
BEN OKRI