Competition between women is good only if it does not prevail; that is to say if it coexists with affinity, affection, with a real sense of being mutually indispensable, with sudden peaks of solidarity in spite of envy, jealousy and the whole inevitable cohort of bad feelings.
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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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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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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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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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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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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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 didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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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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 fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
ELENA FERRANTE