Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories…The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.
ELENA FERRANTEThere 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.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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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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Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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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.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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.
ELENA FERRANTE -
The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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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The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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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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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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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.
ELENA FERRANTE