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.
ELENA FERRANTEIt’s the people who love us or hate us – or both – who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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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 rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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.
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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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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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 had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.
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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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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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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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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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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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The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
ELENA FERRANTE