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Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

Ben Okri

I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
BEN OKRI

Homeless Miserable Wit
A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
BEN OKRI

Battle Fighting Men
Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
BEN OKRI

Artist Broken Enemy
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.
BEN OKRI

Children Dream Kids
If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.
BEN OKRI

Afraid Dancer Love Spirit
An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
BEN OKRI

Darker Darkness Inner
One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’
BEN OKRI

Another Ourselves Planted Unknowingly
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
BEN OKRI

Inventing Reality Stop Thing
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
BEN OKRI

Country Home Literature
We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
BEN OKRI

Enchanted Spirit Time
Our time here is magic! It’s the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It’s the only space.
BEN OKRI

Beautiful Space Unique
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.
BEN OKRI

Realizing Suffering World
To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
BEN OKRI

Belief Quite Situation Something
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
BEN OKRI

Create Eventually Make People
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
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 OKRI

Ghetto Imagination Vibrancy

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

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Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

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Popular Authors

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