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 FERRANTEIn order not to cut out a large part of one’s private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.
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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.
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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.
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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
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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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I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
ELENA FERRANTE