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 FERRANTEThe rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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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 didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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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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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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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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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The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
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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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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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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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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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Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
ELENA FERRANTE