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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.

-Ben Okri

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One Human Life Is

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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Reading, Therefore, Is A Co-production Between Writer And Reader. The Simplicity Of This Tool Is Astounding. So Little, Yet Out Of It Whole Worlds, Eras, Characters, Continents, People Never Encountered Before, People You Wouldn’t Care To Sit Next To In A Train, People That Don’t Exist, Places You’ve Never Visited, Enigmatic Fates, All Come To Life In The Mind, Painted Into Existence By The Reader’s Creative Powers. In This Way The Creativity Of The Writer Calls Up The Creativity Of The Reader. Reading Is Never Passive.

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

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

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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I Know That Human Beings Are Capable Of Anything.

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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You Are A Mischievous One. You Will Cause No End Of Trouble. You Have To Travel Many Roads Before You Find The River Of Your Destiny. This Life Of Yours Will Be Full Of Riddles. You Will Be Protected And You Will Never Be Alone.

Bad Things Will Happen And Good Things Too. Your Life Will Be Full Of Surprises. Miracles Happen Only Where There Has Been Suffering. So Taste Your Grief To The Fullest. Don’t Try And Press It Down. Don’t Hide From It. Don’t Escape. It Is Life Too. It Is Truth. But It Will Pass And Time Will Put A Strange Honey In The Bitterness. That’s The Way Life Goes.

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.

The Higher The Artist, The Fewer The Gestures. The Fewer The Tools, The Greater The Imagination. The Greater The Will, The Greater The Secret Failure.

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.

If We Are True, If We Can Love, If We Have Vision, If We Can Have Courage, We Can, We Should, We Ought To, We Will.

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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