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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.

Ben Okri

One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’
BEN OKRI

Another Ourselves Planted Unknowingly
To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
BEN OKRI

Anyone Home Homeless
Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.
BEN OKRI

Dream Flower Strong
To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
BEN OKRI

Belief Quite Situation Something
There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
BEN OKRI

Art Humanity Three
I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
BEN OKRI

Children Dream Kids
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.
BEN OKRI

Beautiful Despair Secret
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.
BEN OKRI

Heart Mad People
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
BEN OKRI

Childhood Destiny Dream
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.
BEN OKRI

Escape Life Press Strange
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
Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you’ve got left is your belief in the imagination.
BEN OKRI

Ghetto Imagination Vibrancy
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
BEN OKRI

Order Smile Squares
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
BEN OKRI

Create Eventually Make People
An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
BEN OKRI

Darker Darkness Inner
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

Around Destiny Expected Riddle Way

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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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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Popular Authors

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