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Exlpore more Despair quotes
"Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair."
"I've found a different way to scent the air: already it's a by-word for despair."
"We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else."
"There was a listlessness in his gait, as if he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore. The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided."
"Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair."
"Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something, croak this awful habit of not ever getting to the end- of anything."
"The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair."
"And ask each passenger to tell his story, and if there is one of them all who has not cursed his existence many times, and said to himself over and over again that he was the most miserable of men, I give you permission to throw me head-first into the sea."
"Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference."
Explore more quotes by Ben Okri
"I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare."
"The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell."
"We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings."
"I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends' floors, was happy, was miserable."
"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."
"You see, 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."
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