Elena Ferrante Quotes
I pay attention to every system of conventions and expectations, above all literary conventions and the expectations they generate in readers. But that law-abiding side of me, sooner or later, has to face my disobedient side. And, in the end, the latter always wins.
Quotes to Explore
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I'm hardly macho. I present myself as very unnoticeable.
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Choose to be kind. Choose to forgive. Let your love grow and shine so that people may look at the example of your life and glorify God in Heaven.
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My father was very disappointed by war and fighting. And he thought language could help us out of cycles of revenge and animosity. And so, as a journalist, he always found himself asking lots of questions and trying to gather information. He was always very clear to underscore the fact that Jewish people and Arab people were brother and sister.
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I think probably the majority of political actions don't go the way people are going to go. Just because there were unexpected consequences and maybe not the resolution people would have liked to have been seen doesn't mean it was less valid of an action.
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When my father died in my arms it had such a profound affect on me that at that very moment when my dad passed I realized that I needed to face my own fears.
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I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.
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In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!
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My unreality is chiefly this: I have never felt much like a human being. It's a splendid feeling.
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While change is rarely comfortable, I am happy to say that we not only survived but also grew more capable in the process - seeding much of the information revolution which now pervades the world in which we live.
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Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.
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Be a hard master to yourself - and be lenient to everybody else.
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I am a soldier and accustomed to risking my life every day. I am full of the fire of youth; I cannot act with the restraint of an accomplished diplomat.
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Reporters often forget that athletes are human beings.
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When one wants to be natural, of necessity one becomes the reverse of natural.
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Every actor. every director, everybody needs an Oscar. You have to have that little statue in Hollywood or else you are nothing.
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Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead. She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.
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In the films the good guy always wins, but this is one bad guy who ain't gonna lose.
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I have a great deal of sympathy for reluctant readers because I was one. I would do anything to avoid reading. In my case, it wasn't until I was 13 and discovered the 'Lord of the Rings' that I learned to love reading.
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My theory is that poems are written because of a state of emotional irritation. It may be present for some time before the poet is conscious of what is tormenting him. The emotional irritation springs, probably, from subconscious combinations of partly forgotten thoughts and feelings. Coming together, like electrical currents in a thunder storm, they produce a poem. ... the poem is written to free the poet from an emotional burden.
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I pay attention to every system of conventions and expectations, above all literary conventions and the expectations they generate in readers. But that law-abiding side of me, sooner or later, has to face my disobedient side. And, in the end, the latter always wins.
