One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.
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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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 whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.
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Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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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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The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it
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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 am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes.
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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.
BEN OKRI








