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Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

Ben Okri

People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
BEN OKRI

Healthy People Stories
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
BEN OKRI

Jazz Past Together
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

Create History People Protected Transformer
There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
BEN OKRI

Art Humanity Three
I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
BEN OKRI

Again Down Up Change
To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
BEN OKRI

Anyone Home Homeless
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.
BEN OKRI

Artist Imagination Secret
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.
BEN OKRI

Around Destiny Expected Riddle Way
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
BEN OKRI

Order Smile Squares
I was going to be a scientist.
BEN OKRI

Dream Going Job Scientist
The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
BEN OKRI

Law Police World
We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
BEN OKRI

Definitions Destination Require Stop
A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
BEN OKRI

Battle Fighting Men
Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.
BEN OKRI

Good Higher Success Surprise
In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.
BEN OKRI

Hungry Rivers World
When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
BEN OKRI

Chaos Deities Eras

Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

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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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Popular Authors

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