Elena Ferrante Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.

Elena Ferrante
Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones.

Elena Ferrante
Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.

Elena Ferrante
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
Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.

Elena Ferrante
Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity.

Elena Ferrante
There are moments when we resort to senseless formulations and advance absurd claims to hide straightforward feelings.

Elena Ferrante
It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

Elena Ferrante
Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it.

Elena Ferrante
As a girl-twelve, thirteen years old-I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me.

Elena Ferrante
You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.

Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante is the author of several novels. There is nothing mysterious about her, given how she manifests herself - perhaps even too much - in her own writing, the place where her creative life transpires in absolute fullness.

Elena Ferrante
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.

Elena Ferrante
At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.

Elena Ferrante
The fictional treatment of biographical material - a treatment that for me is essential - is full of traps.

Elena Ferrante
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.

Elena Ferrante
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.

Elena Ferrante
I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

Elena Ferrante
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.

Elena Ferrante
The greater the attention to the sentence, the more laboriously the story flows.

Elena Ferrante
I'm still very interested in testifying against the self-promotion ­obsessively ­imposed by the media. This demand for self-promotion diminishes the ­actual work of art, whatever that art may be, and it has become universal.

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

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 Ferrante
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
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
Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.

Elena Ferrante
There is no work of literature that is not the fruit of tradition.

Elena Ferrante
I don't think anyone really knows how a story takes shape. When it's done you try to explain how it happened, but every effort, at least in my case, is insufficient. There is a before, made up of fragments of memory, and an after, when the story begins.

Elena Ferrante
To subject a dream experience to the logic of the waking state is an extreme test of writing. You can never reproduce a dream exactly. It's a losing battle. But putting into words the truth of a gesture, a feeling, a flow of events, without domesticating it, is also an operation that's not as simple as you might think.

Elena Ferrante
An ambitious novelist has a duty, now more than ever, to have a vast literary culture.

Elena Ferrante