Elena Ferrante quotes
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“The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.”
-- Elena FerranteSource : Elena Ferrante (2005). “The Days of Abandonment”, p.83, Penguin
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“The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose”
-- Elena FerranteSource : Elena Ferrante (2005). “The Days of Abandonment”, p.144, Penguin
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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 FerranteSource : Elena Ferrante (2005). “The Days of Abandonment”, p.164, Penguin
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“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, 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 -
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“I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.”
-- Elena FerranteSource : Elena Ferrante (2016). “Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey”, p.206, Penguin
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“There 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. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.”
-- Elena FerranteSource : Elena Ferrante (2015). “The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante Boxed Set”, p.93, Penguin
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“I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.”
-- Elena Ferrante -
“I 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 FerranteSource : Elena Ferrante (2005). “The Days of Abandonment”, p.64, Penguin
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“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 Ferrante -
“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 Ferrante -
“Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.”
-- Elena FerranteSource : Elena Ferrante (2013). “The Story of a New Name: Neapolitan Novels, Book Two”, p.419, Penguin
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