Quote

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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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Consciousness
Water
Read
Subtly
Tell
Altering
Night
Beware
Stories
Waters
World
Beneath
Inspiring

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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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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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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled .. (they) helped the community live though one more darkness, with eyes wide open, and with hearts set alight.
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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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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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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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The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
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