A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
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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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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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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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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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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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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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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 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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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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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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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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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.
ELENA FERRANTE