Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
ELENA FERRANTEThe essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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.
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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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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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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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 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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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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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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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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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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The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
ELENA FERRANTE