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 FERRANTEI 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.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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 -
I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
ELENA FERRANTE -
Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
ELENA FERRANTE -
Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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 -
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 -
At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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 FERRANTE -
The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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 -
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 -
A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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 -
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.
ELENA FERRANTE