Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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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If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft
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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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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.
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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.
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What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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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.
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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.
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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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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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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
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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