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Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.

Ben Okri

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Best
Much
Always
Perish
Things
Destroyed
Despair
Growing
Secret
Beautiful

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We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
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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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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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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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Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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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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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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
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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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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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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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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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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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