I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
BEN OKRIIn 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
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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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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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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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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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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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When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.
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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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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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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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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
BEN OKRI