Ben Okri (1)
Updated: Sep 26
My celebration of Ben Okri’s wonderful collection of essays, A Way of Being Free, published in 1997.
I love this book, it’s a poetic and beautiful homage to storytelling, writing, creativity and freedom, presented with a positive spirit of human flourishing and connectivity.
My focus here is a quote from the essay, The Joys of Storytelling 1.
For context I began with these quotes.
Quote 1: "Homo fabula: we are storytelling beings."
Quote 2: "We are part human, part stories."
Both from Okri's essay, The Joys of Storytelling 3, page 114 of the 1998 Phoenix edition.
The main quote. Quote 3: "In a fractured age when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted - knowingly or unknowingly - in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives."
From, The Joys of Storytelling 1, page 46 as above.
For more literature related talk go to my website - frank-foley.com
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Birds of heaven.
I brought and given away many copies