We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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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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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 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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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.
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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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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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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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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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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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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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The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
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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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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
ELENA FERRANTE