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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.

Ben Okri

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
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?
BEN OKRI

Beautiful Gun Reality
Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
BEN OKRI

Asylums Cases Planet
I know that human beings are capable of anything.
BEN OKRI

Capable Humans Knows
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
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

Afraid Dancer Love Spirit
People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
BEN OKRI

Healthy People Stories
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.
BEN OKRI

Individual Secret Stories
To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
BEN OKRI

Belief Quite Situation Something
Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
BEN OKRI

Artist Broken Enemy
Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
BEN OKRI

Checks Everyone Read Reading
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
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
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
I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
BEN OKRI

Homeless Miserable Wit
The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.
BEN OKRI

Birds Fish Inside Magic Strange

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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Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ben Okri Quotes