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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

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.

Elena Ferrante

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More Elena Ferrante Quotes

• 

  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.

  ELENA FERRANTE
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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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• 

  The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose

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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.

  ELENA FERRANTE
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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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  AnswerDiscoverDisturbFindMostNayPleasureQuestionRecentlySomethingWriteWritten
• 

  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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  AcceptableBuildGameOnlyPeopleReinventedSomethingStreetThinkUnbearable
• 

  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.

  ELENA FERRANTE
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• 

  The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.

  ELENA FERRANTE
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• 

  Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others.

  ELENA FERRANTE
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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.

  ELENA FERRANTE
  ConstituteHugeMaleObstacleRecountRichSexuallyThinkTradition
• 

  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
  AbsolutelyBelieveBookCertainDepressedGirlGoodHeroManOldThirteenYear
• 

  I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

  ELENA FERRANTE
  AuthorBelieveBookNeedNoOnceWritten
• 

  It’s the people who love us or hate us – or both – who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

  ELENA FERRANTE
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• 

  Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.

  ELENA FERRANTE
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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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• 

  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.

  ELENA FERRANTE
  AffectionAffinityBetweenCoexistCompetitionDoes SayGoodIndispemdibleMutuallyOnlyRalSenseSuddenWomen