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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

Ben Okri

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
What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings?
BEN OKRI

Beautiful Gun Reality
An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
BEN OKRI

Darker Darkness Inner
Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
BEN OKRI

Enemy Expression Silence
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
BEN OKRI

Childhood Destiny Dream
You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.
BEN OKRI

Cause Destiny Rivers
The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.
BEN OKRI

Absolutely Reader Writing
Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
BEN OKRI

Artist Broken Enemy
Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest.
BEN OKRI

Grief Miracle Suffering
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
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
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.
BEN OKRI

Escape Life Press Strange
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
The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
BEN OKRI

Facts Hint Perfection
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
To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. … That’s what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.
BEN OKRI

Mind Perfect Story

There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

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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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