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.
ELENA FERRANTEWomen, 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.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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.
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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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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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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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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 circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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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.
ELENA FERRANTE