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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.

Ben Okri

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Every
Arrived
Destination
Definition
Definitions
Requires
Stop
Point

More quotes by Ben Okri

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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
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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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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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.
Ben Okri
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.
Ben Okri
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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
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri