We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
ELENA FERRANTEA calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
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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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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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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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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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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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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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