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.
BEN OKRIThe 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train.
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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.
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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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a dream can be the highest point of a life
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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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Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
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The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.
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I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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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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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.
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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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What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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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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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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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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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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Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
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