One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
BEN OKRIDon’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
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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.
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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.
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A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
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a dream can be the highest point of a life
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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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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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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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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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To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they
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The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
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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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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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