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.
ELENA FERRANTECertainly 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.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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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 think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
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.
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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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I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.
ELENA FERRANTE -
The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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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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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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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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.
ELENA FERRANTE -
I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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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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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
ELENA FERRANTE