Elena Ferrante Quotes
She was a woman who liked to be busy. If she needed something, she picked up the telephone and, link by link, put together the chain that led to her goal. She knew how to ask in such a way that saying no was impossible. And she crossed ideological borders confidently, she respected no hierarchies, she tracked down cleaning women, bureaucrats, industrialists, intellectuals, ministers, and she addressed all with cordial detachment, as if the favor she was about to ask she was in fact already doing for them.
Quotes to Explore
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Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.
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Excellence is not a skill, it's an attitude.
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I'm really about my family and really proud of being a Carter.
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If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.
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You shouldn't try to manufacture progress.
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All my life I have fought corruption.
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I write the novels that are possible for me to write, not that ones I think will come across in a certain light.
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A lot of people thought I wasn't doing anything because I was spending a lot of time socialising and going out, but I've always managed to get work actually done.
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You never know what events are going to transpire to get you home.
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Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?
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Charter schools have a far higher proportion of teachers who are not certified.
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It's true, you never forget your first love, and, for me, that will always be Paris.
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When I got my band in 1983, I knew what I had to do. If I'm going to have a big band, they're going to have to sound equally as good as what I'm used to hearing.
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There is also a natural and very, very strong empathy with the underdog, with people who have suffered, people who have been pushed around by foreigners in particular, but also by their own people.
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I have nothing to explain. As for being misunderstood, I have grown accustomed to that.
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A healthy vision of the future is not possible without an accurate knowledge of the past.
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I had a suit made for me when I was five. It was double-breasted, mohair and purple. My mother was very particular about clothing - it always used to have to go back into the plastic and it used to drive me insane.
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I don't know what more to say. I mean, we're all going to die in a world that is worse than when we entered it.
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If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit.
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In the lab, we could not see or physically describe the mathematical objects that we called quarks, which we suspected were the key to unlocking the dynamics of the strong force that binds together the clump of protons and neutrons at the center of the atom.
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Back in the day, I had this fluoro pink hoodie that I thought was the coolest thing ever. Left it at a party and never saw it again. Probably the best thing that could have happened.
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When I was 11 years old, my family had to leave East Germany and begin a new life in West Germany overnight. Until my father could get back into his original profession as a government employee, my parents operated a small laundry business in our little town. I became the laundry delivery boy.
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You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.
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She was a woman who liked to be busy. If she needed something, she picked up the telephone and, link by link, put together the chain that led to her goal. She knew how to ask in such a way that saying no was impossible. And she crossed ideological borders confidently, she respected no hierarchies, she tracked down cleaning women, bureaucrats, industrialists, intellectuals, ministers, and she addressed all with cordial detachment, as if the favor she was about to ask she was in fact already doing for them.
