Elena Ferrante

Italy

Writer

Quotes



No, to produce ideas you don't have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.
Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.
To write, you have to want something to survive you.
In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays