Even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.
ELENA FERRANTEThe rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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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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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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.
ELENA FERRANTE