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 OKRIDestiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
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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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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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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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I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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If 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
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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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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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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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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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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.
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Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
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