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 OKRIPeople are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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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.
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a dream can be the highest point of a life
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I was going to be a scientist.
BEN OKRI -
We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It’s just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there.
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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 learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
BEN OKRI -
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
BEN OKRI -
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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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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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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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.
BEN OKRI