The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
ELENA FERRANTEAt most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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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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The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.
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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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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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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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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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.
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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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Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
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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 think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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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.
ELENA FERRANTE