There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
BEN OKRIIt 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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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.
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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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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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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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People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.
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You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.
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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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One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’
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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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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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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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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. … That’s what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.
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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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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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An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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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 greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
BEN OKRI