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.
BEN OKRIThe greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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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Our time here is magic! It’s the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It’s the only space.
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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
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It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.
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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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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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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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One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’
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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
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There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy… But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason…
BEN OKRI