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 OKRIA people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation… Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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.’
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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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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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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.
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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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I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
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Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.
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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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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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Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
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We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
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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.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
BEN OKRI