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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.

Ben Okri

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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Character Country Ghetto
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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Create Eventually Make People
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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Birds Fish Inside Magic Strange
When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.
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Realizing Suffering World
I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
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Again Down Up Change
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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Law Police World
We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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Definitions Destination Require Stop
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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Art Poison Stories
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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Ocean People Stories
If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.
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Afraid Dancer Love Spirit
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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Book Reading Writing
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
I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
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Homeless Miserable Wit
An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
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Darker Darkness Inner
People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.
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Create History People Protected Transformer
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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Mad Silence Stories
When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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Chaos Deities Eras
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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Beautiful Gun Reality
It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.
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Agreement Important Writing
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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Office Perfect Writing
I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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Fighting People Share
This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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Down Grows Like
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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Good Higher Success Surprise
One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’
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Another Ourselves Planted Unknowingly
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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Order Smile Squares
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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Power Should Vision
Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes.
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Escape Life Press Strange

When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.

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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.

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