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.
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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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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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 didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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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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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
ELENA FERRANTE