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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

When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
BEN OKRI

Inventing Reality Stop Thing
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
A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
BEN OKRI

Able Men Sometimes
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
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
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
Literature doesn’t have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.
BEN OKRI

Character Country Ghetto
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
The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.
BEN OKRI

Absolutely Reader Writing
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

Soul Stories Three
The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.
BEN OKRI

Artist Imagination Secret
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
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 OKRI

Beautiful Space Unique
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI

Art Hide Magic Nothing
The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
BEN OKRI

Converting Stories World
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

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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