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The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

Ben Okri

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.
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Character Country Ghetto
The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.
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Absolutely Reader Writing
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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Office Perfect Writing
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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Power Should Vision
A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
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Battle Fighting Men
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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Character Creativity Reading
An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
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Darker Darkness Inner
The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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Converting Stories World
Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do.
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Discovery Dream Exemptarty Stone Thing
a dream can be the highest point of a life
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Dream Highest Life
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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Inspiring Night Water
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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Inventing Reality Stop Thing
To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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Belief Quite Situation Something
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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Order Smile Squares
This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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Down Grows Like
Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.
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Individual Secret Stories
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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Create Eventually Make People
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.
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Dream Inspirational Real
$Ben Okri Quote - The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.$

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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Age Giving Stories
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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Cause Destiny Rivers
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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Childhood Destiny Dream
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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Beautiful Despair Secret
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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Art Hide Magic Nothing
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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Dream Flower Strong
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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Children Dream Kids
The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
BEN OKRI

Facts Hint Perfection
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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Ghetto Imagination Vibrancy

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

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The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

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Popular Authors

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