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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

Ben Okri

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Would
Mad
Life
Silence
Lose
Loses
Living
Stories
Moorings
Without
Orientations
Even
Orientation

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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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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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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
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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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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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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 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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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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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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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
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The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.
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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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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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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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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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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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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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