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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

Ben Okri

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Must
Men
Drunkenness
Life
Necessary
Drink
Hold
Difficult
Able
Sometimes

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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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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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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
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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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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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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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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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The road will never swallow you. The river of destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger. 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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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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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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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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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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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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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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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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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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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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