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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

Related Topics

QueenSpadeStingWsp

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More Elena Ferrante Quotes

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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.

  ELENA FERRANTE
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• 

  The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.

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• 

  Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.

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  AnonymityConcentrateExclusiveLetWriting
• 

  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.

  ELENA FERRANTE
  AcceptableBuildGameOnlyPeopleReinventedSomethingStreetThinkUnbearable
• 

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

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  AroundBrutalCircleEmptyNeckNightNooseTighten
• 

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

  ELENA FERRANTE
  CallCountryDisbeliefNeedPersonSuspensionWillingWrite
• 

  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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• 

  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
  AnswerBeingBookContainPublicationQuestionReasonStopThemselvesWork
• 

  Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.

  ELENA FERRANTE
  BeenBehindDealEconomicsFeelGreatGuiltHardLaddrLeftTowardsTumbling
• 

  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
  CertainlyDuringHappensNightSomething
• 

  I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.

  ELENA FERRANTE
  AbsenceAnonymousChooseInstead
• 

  We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.

  ELENA FERRANTE
  ExistenceLieMostOrderOurselvesTolerate
• 

  I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.

  ELENA FERRANTE
  ConstituteHugeMaleObstacleRecountRichSexuallyThinkTradition
• 

  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.

  ELENA FERRANTE
  BeingBigBossEndingneverPassionPoliticsSmallSpecial
• 

  A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

  ELENA FERRANTE
  BetweenCalculateCalendarEmotionFactNarratePass
• 

  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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  AbsolutelyBelieveBookCertainDepressedGirlGoodHeroManOldThirteenYear