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If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.

Ben Okri

I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
BEN OKRI

Again Down Up Change
One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.
BEN OKRI

Dream Ocean Rocks
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.
BEN OKRI

Agreement Important Writing
Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
BEN OKRI

Inspiring Night Water
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.
BEN OKRI

Life Reality Running
Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
BEN OKRI

Checks Everyone Read Reading
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.
BEN OKRI

Beautiful Space Unique
Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
BEN OKRI

Gold Neglect Yards
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
BEN OKRI

Country Home Literature
A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
BEN OKRI

Battle Fighting Men
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
BEN OKRI

Jazz Past Together
I was going to be a scientist.
BEN OKRI

Dream Going Job Scientist
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI

Art Magic Nothing
Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories
BEN OKRI

Mad Silence Stories
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
BEN OKRI

Inventing Reality Stop Thing
Literature doesn’t have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.
BEN OKRI

Character Country Ghetto

If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.

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If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ben Okri Quotes