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 OKRIStories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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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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The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult 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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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.
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An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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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 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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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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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.
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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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I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
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I’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.
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When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.
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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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Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
BEN OKRI -
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
BEN OKRI -
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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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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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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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.
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Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
BEN OKRI