Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.
BEN OKRIStories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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…
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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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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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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I’m conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There’s hardly a day that goes past on which I don’t write poetry.
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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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What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings?
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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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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A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
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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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The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
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Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes.
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
BEN OKRI