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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
Stop
Point
Every
Arrived
Destination
Definition
Definitions
Requires

More quotes by Ben Okri

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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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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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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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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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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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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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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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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
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I was born left-handed, but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing 'Famished Road,' which was very long, I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed, so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser, so later on I had to change it.
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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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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.
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.
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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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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.
Ben Okri