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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

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
BEN OKRI

Attention Common Magic
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
BEN OKRI

Fear Heart Telling Stories
There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
BEN OKRI

Art Humanity Three
A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
BEN OKRI

Battle Fighting Men
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
An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
BEN OKRI

Darker Darkness Inner
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
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.
BEN OKRI

Individual Secret Stories
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
Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
BEN OKRI

Enemy Expression Silence
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
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI

Art Magic Nothing
Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
BEN OKRI

Checks Everyone Read Reading
One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.
BEN OKRI

Dream Ocean Rocks
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
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
BEN OKRI

Fiction Humanity Mean
When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
BEN OKRI

Chaos Deities Eras
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
$Ben Okri Quote - The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.$

The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
BEN OKRI

Age Giving Stories
Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
BEN OKRI

Artist Broken Enemy
I was going to be a scientist.
BEN OKRI

Dream Going Job Scientist
People that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.
BEN OKRI

Come Creative Mind Pianetd Power
There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy… But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason…
BEN OKRI

Fighting Heroism People
To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
BEN OKRI

Anyone Home Homeless
Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
BEN OKRI

Gold Neglect Yards
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
BEN OKRI

Office Perfect Writing
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

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.

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Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ben Okri Quotes