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.
ELENA FERRANTEHe 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.
ELENA FERRANTEI am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.
ELENA FERRANTEWriting 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 FERRANTEWriters, 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 FERRANTECompetition 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 FERRANTEI 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.
ELENA FERRANTEClimbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.
ELENA FERRANTEI 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.
ELENA FERRANTEThe rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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.
ELENA FERRANTEI believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
ELENA FERRANTEA calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
ELENA FERRANTEI think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
ELENA FERRANTECertainly 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.
ELENA FERRANTEI didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
ELENA FERRANTE