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 FERRANTEI 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.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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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 rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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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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 think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
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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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The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
ELENA FERRANTE