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There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy… But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason…

Ben Okri

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
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
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.
BEN OKRI

Agreement Important Writing
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
a dream can be the highest point of a life
BEN OKRI

Dream Highest Life
I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
BEN OKRI

Fighting People Share
I was going to be a scientist.
BEN OKRI

Dream Going Job Scientist
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.
BEN OKRI

Ghetto Imagination Vibrancy
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

Circles Past Writing
We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
BEN OKRI

Definitions Destination Require Stop
The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
BEN OKRI

Facts Hint Perfection
People that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.
BEN OKRI

Come Creative Mind Pianetd Power
Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
BEN OKRI

Gold Neglect Yards
I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
BEN OKRI

Again Down Up Change
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
This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
BEN OKRI

Down Grows Like

There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy… But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason…

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There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy… But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason…

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ben Okri Quotes