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.
BEN OKRIThe 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.
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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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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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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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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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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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you’ve got left is your belief in the imagination.
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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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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
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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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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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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.’
BEN OKRI