I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
ELENA FERRANTEIn 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.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
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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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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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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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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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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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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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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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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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 -
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.
ELENA FERRANTE