A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
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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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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 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 don’t have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.
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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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Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
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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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The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
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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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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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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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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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At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.
ELENA FERRANTE