Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRIWhen 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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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 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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What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
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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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To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. … That’s what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.
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An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
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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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Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they’ll only see their narrow range reflected in it.
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Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.
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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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Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do.
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
BEN OKRI