When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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 must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
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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…
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If we are true, if we can love, if we have vision, if we can have courage, we can, we should, we ought to, we will.
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The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
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We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
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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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The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
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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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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?
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I was going to be a scientist.
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Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It’s just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there.
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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 higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.
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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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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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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.
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Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
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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 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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Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
BEN OKRI