I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
ELENA FERRANTEThose who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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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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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 didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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.
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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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.
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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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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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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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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.
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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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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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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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A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
ELENA FERRANTE