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 OKRIPeople 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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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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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.
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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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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