We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.
BEN OKRIThe magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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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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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 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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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
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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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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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Bad 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.
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What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled 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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People that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.
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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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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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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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Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
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If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft
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