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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

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A People Are As

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.

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Yes, The Highest Things Are Beyond Words. That Is Probably Why All Art Aspires To The Condition Of Wordlessness. When Literature Works On You, It Does So In Silence, In Your Dreams, In Your Wordless Moments. Good Words Enter You And Become Moods, Become The Quiet Fabric Of Your Being. Like Music, Like Painting, Literature Too Wants To Transcend Its Primary Condition And Become Something Higher. Art Wants To Move Into Silence, Into The Emotional And Spiritual Conditions Of The World. Statues Become Melodies, Melodies Become Yearnings, Yearnings Become Actions.

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.

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.

What You See Is What You Make. What You See In A People Is What You Eventually Create In Them.

Destiny Plans A Different Route And Fulfills The Dream In Ways We Couldn't Have Expected.

The Most Authentic Thing About Us Is Our Capacity To Create, To Overcome, To Endure, To Transform, To Love And To Be Greater Than Our Suffering.

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We Can Redream This World And Make The Dream Come Real. Human Beings Are Gods Hidden From Themselves.

Creativity Is The Art Of The Impossible

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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.

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.

I Was Told Stories, We Were All Told Stories As Kids In Nigeria. We Had To Tell Stories That Would Keep One Another Interested, And You Weren't Allowed To Tell Stories That Everybody Else Knew. You Had To Dream Up New Ones.

Reading, Like Writing, Is A Creative Act. If Readers Only Bring A Narrow Range Of Themselves To The Book, Then They'll Only See Their Narrow Range Reflected In It.

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.

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.

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.

To Sustain Your Belief Through Situations That Completely Undermine It Is Quite Something.

A Man Must Be Able To Hold His Drink Because Drunkenness Is Sometimes Necessary In This Difficult Life.

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A Dream Can Be The Highest Point Of A Life

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