I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.
ELENA FERRANTEI believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
-
-
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 -
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.
ELENA FERRANTE -
Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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.
ELENA FERRANTE -
The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
ELENA FERRANTE -
We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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.
ELENA FERRANTE -
Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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 FERRANTE -
It’s the people who love us or hate us – or both – who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.
ELENA FERRANTE -
Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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 -
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 -
The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.
ELENA FERRANTE