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.
ELENA FERRANTEClimbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
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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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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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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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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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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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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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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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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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.
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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.
ELENA FERRANTE