I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
ELENA FERRANTEExistence 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.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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.
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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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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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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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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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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
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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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In 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.
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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.
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I 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.
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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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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






