Elena Ferrante famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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 Ferrante

#Needs #Stories #Calendars
The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
-- Elena Ferrante

#Night #Circles #Necks
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

#Pain #Joy #Skins
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

#Dream #Children #Pain
I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
-- Elena Ferrante

#Believe #Book #Needs
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 Ferrante

#Play #Games #People
I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
-- Elena Ferrante

#Absence #Anonymity
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 Ferrante

#Queens #Dark #Animal
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

#Memories #Reading #Writing
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

#Book #Character #Way
Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
-- Elena Ferrante

#Examination #Moments #Pleasure

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