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
BEN OKRIIf 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
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.
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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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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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Don’t despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.
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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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Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
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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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You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.
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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 you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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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.
BEN OKRI