La frantumaglia Quotes

“To tolerate existence, we lie, and we lie above all to ourselves. Sometimes we tell ourselves lovely tales, sometimes petty lies. Falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reflection, they dilute the horrors of our time, they even save us from ourselves.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“Reading and writing are closed-room activities, which literally take you away from the gaze of others. The greater risk is that they also remove others from your gaze.”
― Elena Ferrante, Fragments: Elena Ferrante on Writing, Reading, and Anonymity

“As long as one writes only for oneself, writing is a free act by means of which, to use an oxymoron, one secretly opens oneself.”
― Elena Ferrante, Fragments: Elena Ferrante on Writing, Reading, and Anonymity

“The frantumaglia is an unstable landscape, an infinite aerial or aquatic mass of debris that appears to the I, brutally, as its true and unique inner self. The frantumaglia is the storehouse of time without the orderliness of a history, a story. The frantumaglia is an effect of the sense of loss, when we’re sure that everything that seems to us stable, lasting, an anchor for our life, will soon join that landscape of debris that we seem to see. The frantumaglia is to perceive with excruciating anguish the heterogeneous crowd from which we, living, raise our voice, and the heterogeneous crowd into which it is fated to vanish.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“Even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“Individuals and cities without love are a danger to themselves and to others.”
― Elena Ferrante, Fragments: Elena Ferrante on Writing, Reading, and Anonymity

“That even if we're constantly tempted to lower our guard -- out of love, or weariness, or sympathy, or kindness-- we women shouldn't do it. We can lose from one moment to the next everything that we have achieved.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“In fiction we say and recognize things about ourselves, which, for the sake of propriety, we ignore or don't talk about in reality.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“We are tornadoes that pick up fragments with the most varied historical and biological origins. This makes of us -- thankfully -- fickle agglomerations that maintain a fragile equilibrium, that are inconsistent and complex, that can't be reduced to any fixed framework that does not inevitably leave out a great deal. Which is why the more effective stories resemble ramparts from which one can gaze out at everything that has been excluded.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“But the happy ending has to do with the tricks of the narrative, not with life, or even love, which is an uncontrollable, changeable feeling, with nasty surprises that are alien to the happy ending.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“The ‘right reading’ is an invention of academics and critics. Every reader gets from the book he is reading nothing else but his book. The shelves where we line up the volumes we’ve read are deceptive. We have available there only titles, covers, pages. But the books we’ve truly read are phantoms conjured up by reading with no rules.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“Leo muchísimo pero sin ningún orden, y olvido lo que leo.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia: Un viaje por la escritura

“A book should push the reader to confront himself and the world”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“Why would anyone be interested in my little personal story if we can do without Homer's or Shakespeare's? Someone who truly loves literature is like a person of faith. The believer knows very well that there is nothing at all at the bureau of vital statistics about the Jesus that truly counts for him.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“The problem is that real change takes a long time, while life hits us right away, now, with all its contradictions.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“Para los hijos los padres siempre somos molestos.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia: Un viaje por la escritura

“I doubt that work ennobles man and I am absolutely certain that it does not ennoble woman.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“What I expect from a good story is that it will tell me today what I can't know from any other source but that story, from its unique way of putting something into words, from the feeling that it implies.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“el momento en que la escritura parece cuidarse únicamente de sacar adelante la historia. Es ahí donde radica por completo la alegría de escribir.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia: Un viaje por la escritura

“un buen relato es el que se escribe desde el fondo de nuestra vida,”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia: Un viaje por la escritura

“In general, we store away our experiences and make use of timeworn phrases—nice, ready-made, reassuring stylizations that give us a sense of colloquial normality. But in this way, either knowingly or unknowingly, we reject everything that, to be said fully, would require effort and a torturous search for words. Honest writing forces itself to find words for those parts of our experience that are hidden and silent. On one hand, a good story, or, rather, the kind of story I like best, narrates an experience—for example, friendship—following specific conventions that render it recognizable and riveting; on the other hand, it sporadically reveals the magma running beneath the pillars of convention. The fate of a story that tends toward truth by pushing stylizations to their limit depends on the extent to which the reader really wants to face up to herself.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“Someone who takes love away from us devastates the cultural structure we've worked on all our lives, deprives us of that sort of Eden that until that moment had made us appear innocent and lovable. Human beings give the worst of themselves when their cultural clothes are torn off, and they find themselves facing the nakedness of their bodies, they feel the shame of them. In a certain sense the loss of love is the common experience closest to the myth of the expulsion from the earthly paradise: it's the violent end of the illusion of having a heavenly body, it's the discovery of one's own dispensability and perishability.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“As for the minor characters, it seemed natural for each of them to have his good or bad moment in the life of the protagonists and then slip into the background, just as when we think back on our existence and, of the many people who entered the flow of our lives, remember almost nothing.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“In other words, the cultural education of any high-school student should include an introduction to the idea that a writer adapts his writing to ever-changing expressive needs and that a higher or lower note doesn't mean that the singer has changed.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“Only when we feel the story in each of its moments or places are we able to tell it properly.”
― Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey

“I don’t want to accept an idea of life where the success of the self is measured by the success of the written page.”
― Elena Ferrante, Fragments: Elena Ferrante on Writing, Reading, and Anonymity

“No lo sé, es difícil dar una respuesta tajante que sea cierta”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia: Un viatge al cor de l'escriptura

“How and when words escape from books and the books end up seeming like empty graves is something to think about.”
― Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey

“Volevo raccontare una storia di destrutturazione. Chi ci sottrae l’amore devasta la costruzione culturale a cui abbiamo lavorato per tutta la vita, ci priva di quella sorta di Eden che fino a quel momento ci aveva fatto apparire innocenti e amabili. Gli esseri umani danno il peggio di sé quando i loro abiti culturali si lacerano ed essi si trovano di fronte alla nudità dei loro organismi, ne sentono la vergogna. In un certo senso la sottrazione dell’amore è l’esperienza comune più vicina al mito della cacciata dal paradiso terrestre, è la fine violenta dell’illusione di avere un corpo celeste, è la scoperta della propria inessenzialità e deperibilità.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia