My work stops at publication. If the books don’t contain in themselves their reasons for being – questions and answers – it means I was wrong to have them published.
ELENA FERRANTECompetition between women is good only if it does not prevail; that is to say if it coexists with affinity, affection, with a real sense of being mutually indispensable, with sudden peaks of solidarity in spite of envy, jealousy and the whole inevitable cohort of bad feelings.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.
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Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories…The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.
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Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.
ELENA FERRANTE -
Competition between women is good only if it does not prevail; that is to say if it coexists with affinity, affection, with a real sense of being mutually indispensable, with sudden peaks of solidarity in spite of envy, jealousy and the whole inevitable cohort of bad feelings.
ELENA FERRANTE -
The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable.
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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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It’s the people who love us or hate us – or both – who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.
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Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
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Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor.
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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.
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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
ELENA FERRANTE