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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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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Stories
Walk
Great
Walks
Mind
Hell
Teller
Lines
Guide
Clear
Silver
Story
Guides
Perfect
Madness
True
Line

More quotes by Ben Okri

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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 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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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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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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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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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
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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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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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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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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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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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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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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.
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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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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
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This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we're born into stories. I say we're also born from stories.
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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 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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