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.
BEN OKRIThe fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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a dream can be the highest point of a life
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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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To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they
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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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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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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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Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
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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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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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I’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.
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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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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
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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