I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.
ELENA FERRANTEI don’t have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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 -
At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.
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I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.
ELENA FERRANTE -
Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
ELENA FERRANTE -
Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
ELENA FERRANTE -
The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.
ELENA FERRANTE -
As a girl – twelve, thirteen years old – I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me.
ELENA FERRANTE -
Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others.
ELENA FERRANTE -
It’s the people who love us or hate us – or both – who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.
ELENA FERRANTE -
Women, in all fields – whether mothers or not – still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections.
ELENA FERRANTE -
He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.
ELENA FERRANTE -
The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
ELENA FERRANTE -
I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic – if we can call it that – between high and low. Maybe it’s because I was not born or brought up in affluence.
ELENA FERRANTE






