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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

Ben Okri

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train.
BEN OKRI

Character Creativity Reading
Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories
BEN OKRI

Mad Silence Stories
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
BEN OKRI

Create Eventually Make People
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
BEN OKRI

Fear Heart Telling Stories
When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
BEN OKRI

Chaos Deities Eras
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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Cause Destiny Rivers
People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
BEN OKRI

Healthy People Stories
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
BEN OKRI

Order Smile Squares
We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
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Enchanted Spirit Time
A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
BEN OKRI

Battle Fighting Men
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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Inventing Reality Stop Thing
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
A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
BEN OKRI

Able Men Sometimes
Destiny 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.
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Around Destiny Expected Riddle Way
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
The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.
BEN OKRI

Birds Fish Inside Magic Strange

A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

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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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