Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
BEN OKRIDestiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
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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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I was going to be a scientist.
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Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do.
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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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A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
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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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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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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.
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they’ll only see their narrow range reflected in it.
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I’m conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There’s hardly a day that goes past on which I don’t write poetry.
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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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The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it
BEN OKRI







