To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they
BEN OKRII lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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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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What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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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.
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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
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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.
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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
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The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
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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.
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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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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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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.
BEN OKRI