I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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 think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.
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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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.
ELENA FERRANTE