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.
ELENA FERRANTEWomen, 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.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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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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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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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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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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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
ELENA FERRANTE