#Occupy9ja | A Movement for Pragmatic Change

"When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool - Chinua Achebe
"Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love." - Ben Okri
" Strong people make things happen; weak people let things happen."
"If you don't eat yam for the sake of palm oil, you'll eat palm oil for the sake of yam.
"The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism." - Wole Soyinka
"We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected." - Ben Okri
"Politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible." - Ben Okri
"Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger." - Ben Okri
"What's important is that we recognize the falsehood of the notion that the Third World should be abandoned because it's a waste of time." - Chinua Achebe
"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." - Ben Okri
"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"- Ben Okri
"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. - Ben Okri
"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." - Ben Okri
"Suddenly the world has run amok and left you alone and sane behind." - Wole Soyinka
"The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; It is this." - Chinua Achebe
"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." - Ben Okri
"The greatest stories are those that resonate our beginnings and intuit our endings, our mysterious origins and our numinous destinies, and dissolve them both into one." - Ben Okri
"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." - Ben Okri
"The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience." - Chinua Achebe
"Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him." - Chinua Achebe
"We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings." - Ben Okri
"A hunter who has only one arrow does not shoot with careless aim.
" If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, If you teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime."
"It is little by little that a bird builds its nest."

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