To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
BEN OKRIOnly those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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.
BEN OKRI -
The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
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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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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.
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The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
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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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Maybe there are only three kinds of stories: those we live, those we tell, and those that help our souls fly upwards to a greater life.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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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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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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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.
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Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
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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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There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy… But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason…
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Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
BEN OKRI