Leave, instead. Get away for good, far from the life we�ve lived since birth. Settle in well-organized lands where everything really is possible. I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it�s not the neighborhood that�s sick, it�s not Naples, it�s the entire earth, it�s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.

Elena Ferrante, in 'Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay'

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