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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.

Ben Okri

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Undermine
Sustain
Situations
Completely
Quite
Situation
Belief
Something

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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man.
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One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. 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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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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In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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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.
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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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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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To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. ... That's what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
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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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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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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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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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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 went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled .. (they) helped the community live though one more darkness, with eyes wide open, and with hearts set alight.
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