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 FERRANTEThe circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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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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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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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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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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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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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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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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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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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.
ELENA FERRANTE