What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
BEN OKRIWe 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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 was going to be a scientist.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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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.
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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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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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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest.
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We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
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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.
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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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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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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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
BEN OKRI