Alison Mann

“I recognized in them what I had never had and, I now knew, would always lack. What was it? I wasn't able to say precisely: the training, perhaps, to feel that the questions of the world were deeply connected to me; the capacity to feel them as crucial and not purely as information to display at an exam; a mental conformation that didn't reduce everything to my own individual battle, to the effort to be successful.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“Lila is right, one writes not so much to write, one writes to inflict pain on those who wish to inflict pain. The pain of words against the pain of kicks and punches and the instruments of death.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“She was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being all her own, that was still obscure to her.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“you were making them promises about a future. And would not such promises constitute, in anyone’s code, a true cruelty?”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List