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I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.

Ben Okri

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
BEN OKRI

Attention Common Magic
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.
BEN OKRI

Inspirational Love Sympathy
The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it
BEN OKRI

Dream Mean Reality
Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
BEN OKRI

Asylums Cases Planet
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
BEN OKRI

Karma Law Simple
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.
BEN OKRI

Circles Past Writing
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.
BEN OKRI

Hungry Rivers World
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

Law Police World
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.
BEN OKRI

Mind Perfect Story
When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
BEN OKRI

Chaos Deities Eras
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 OKRI

Dream Inspirational Real
Literature doesn’t have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.
BEN OKRI

Character Country Ghetto
To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
BEN OKRI

Belief Quite Situation Something
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.
BEN OKRI

Realizing Suffering World
I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
BEN OKRI

Children Dream Kids
A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
BEN OKRI

Able Men Sometimes

I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.

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I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ben Okri Quotes