We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
BEN OKRIStories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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.
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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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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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We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
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The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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.
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If we are true, if we can love, if we have vision, if we can have courage, we can, we should, we ought to, we will.
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Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do.
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.
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Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they’ll only see their narrow range reflected in it.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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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.
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
BEN OKRI