I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.
ELENA FERRANTECompetition 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.
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.
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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 rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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.
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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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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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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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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 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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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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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.
ELENA FERRANTE