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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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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Chief
Chiefs
Instrument
Chaos
Instruments
Clamorous
Music
Deity
Deities
Eras

More quotes by 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.
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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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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.
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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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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
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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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I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.
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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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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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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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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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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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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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We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.
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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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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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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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