The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
ELENA FERRANTEHe 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.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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.
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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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I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows.
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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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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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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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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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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The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.
ELENA FERRANTE







