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 OKRIStories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.
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In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.
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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.
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.
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An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
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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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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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a dream can be the highest point of a life
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I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
BEN OKRI