Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
BEN OKRIWe have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
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Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories
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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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If we are true, if we can love, if we have vision, if we can have courage, we can, we should, we ought to, we will.
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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.
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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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The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
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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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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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Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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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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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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I was going to be a scientist.
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We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It’s just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there.
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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?
BEN OKRI