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.
ELENA FERRANTEThose who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
-
-
The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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 -
The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
ELENA FERRANTE -
The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
ELENA FERRANTE -
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.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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.
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 -
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.
ELENA FERRANTE -
I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
ELENA FERRANTE -
I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
ELENA FERRANTE -
I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows.
ELENA FERRANTE -
Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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 -
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 -
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