One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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 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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a dream can be the highest point of a life
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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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A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
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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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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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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.
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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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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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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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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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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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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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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.
BEN OKRI