I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.
ELENA FERRANTEWriters, 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.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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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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The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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.
ELENA FERRANTE






