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 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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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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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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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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 rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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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.
ELENA FERRANTE