Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
ELENA FERRANTEI think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.
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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.
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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 think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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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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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I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.
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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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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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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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 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 FERRANTE