People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
BEN OKRIGhetto-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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
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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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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
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This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.
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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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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
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A 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.
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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.
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I was going to be a scientist.
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Our time here is magic! It’s the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It’s the only space.
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I’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.
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Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.
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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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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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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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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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We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
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