We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
BEN OKRIMaybe there are only three kinds of stories: those we live, those we tell, and those that help our souls fly upwards to a greater life.
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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This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.
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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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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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Don’t despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.
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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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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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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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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
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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
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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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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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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.
BEN OKRI