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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 greatest religions convert the world through stories.
BEN OKRI

Converting Stories World
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

Destiny Dream Fate
To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
BEN OKRI

Belief Quite Situation Something
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
BEN OKRI

Inventing Reality Stop Thing
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 OKRI

Art Poison 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
People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.
BEN OKRI

Create History People Protected Transformer
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
Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train.
BEN OKRI

Character Creativity Reading
An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
BEN OKRI

Darker Darkness Inner
This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
BEN OKRI

Down Grows Like
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
Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.
BEN OKRI

Dream Flower Strong
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
Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
BEN OKRI

Inspiring Night Water
We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
BEN OKRI

Enchanted Spirit Time

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…

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Popular Authors

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