Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.”

— Elena Ferrante

2. “It’s the people who love us or hate us – or both – who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.”

— Elena Ferrante

3. “Not for you,” Lila replies ardently, “you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.”

— Elena Ferrante

4. “The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.”

— Elena Ferrante

5. “Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others.”

— Elena Ferrante

6. “If you don’t try, nothing ever changes.”

— Elena Ferrante

7. “Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones.”

— Elena Ferrante

8. “Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.”

— Elena Ferrante

9. “Rino’s mother is named Raffaella Cerullo, but everyone has always called her Lina. Not me, I’ve never used either her first name or her last. To me, for more than sixty years, she’s been Lila. If I were to call her Lina or Raffaella, suddenly, like that, she would think our friendship was over.”

— Elena Ferrante

10. “As a girl-twelve, thirteen years old-I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me.”

— Elena Ferrante

11. “Ognuno si racconta la vita come gli fa comodo.”

— Elena Ferrante

12. “We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.”

— Elena Ferrante

13. “Mi ero accorta da tempo che ognuno si organizza la memoria come gli conviene, tuttora mi sorprendo a farlo anch’io.”

— Elena Ferrante

14. “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

15. “I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.”

— Elena Ferrante

16. “I don’t have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.”

— Elena Ferrante

17. “Males always have something pathetic about them, at every age. A fragile arrogance, a frightened audacity. I no longer know, today, if they ever aroused in me love or only an affectionate sympathy for their weaknesses.”

— Elena Ferrante

18. “What a waste it would be, I said to myself, to ruin our story by leaving too much space for ill feelings: ill feelings are inevitable, but the essential thing is to keep them in check.”

— Elena Ferrante

19. “You’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.”

— Elena Ferrante

20. “Non ci sono gesti, parole, sospiri che non contengano la somma di tutti i crimini che hanno commesso e commettono gli esseri umani.”

— Elena Ferrante

21. “What happened, in other words, in the world of adults, in the heads of very reasonable people, in their bodies loaded with knowledge? What reduced them to the most untrustworthy animals, worse than reptiles?”

— Elena Ferrante

22. “Telling the real, Jacques emphasized, is constitutionally difficult; you have to deal with the fact that the teller is always a distorting mirror.”

— Elena Ferrante

23. “I felt like a drop of rain in a spiderweb, and I was careful not to slide down. We.”

— Elena Ferrante

24. “Women, in all fields – whether mothers or not – still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections.”

— Elena Ferrante

25. “She was like that, she threw things off balance just to see if she could put them back in some other way.”

— Elena Ferrante

26. “I am clean I am true I am playing with my cards on the table.”

— Elena Ferrante

27. “There are people who leave and people who know how to be left.”

— Elena Ferrante

28. “When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.”

— Elena Ferrante

29. “Competition between women is good only if it does not prevail; that is to say if it coexists with affinity, affection, with a real sense of being mutually indispensable, with sudden peaks of solidarity in spite of envy, jealousy and the whole inevitable cohort of bad feelings.”

— Elena Ferrante

30. “Maybe, I thought, I’ve given too much weight to the cultivated use of reason, to good reading, to well controlled language, to political affiliation; maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.”

— Elena Ferrante

31. “Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.”

— Elena Ferrante

32. “Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.”

— Elena Ferrante

33. “If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.”

— Elena Ferrante

34. “Evocai versi e romanzi come tranquillanti. Forse, pensai, aver studiato mi serve solo a questo: a calmarmi.”

— Elena Ferrante

35. “I’ll give you treasure chests full of gold pieces, I know the value of spending time with you.” I.”

— Elena Ferrante

36. “Le cose brutte che non dici a nessuno diventano cani che ti mangiano la testa di notte mentre dormi.”

— Elena Ferrante

37. “They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.”

— Elena Ferrante

38. “At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.”

— Elena Ferrante

39. “I’m lying, yes, but why do you force me to give a linear explanation; linear explanations are almost always lies.”

— Elena Ferrante

40. “Nowhere is it written that you can’t do it.”

— Elena Ferrante

41. “She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.”

— Elena Ferrante

42. “How heavy a body that has been traversed by death is, life is light, there’s no need to let anyone make it heavy for us.”

— Elena Ferrante

43. “Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”

— Elena Ferrante

44. “For the first time, I left Naples, left Campania. I discovered that I was afraid of everything: afraid of taking the wrong train, afraid of having to pee and not knowing where to do it, afraid that it would be night and I wouldn’t be able to orient myself in an unfamiliar city, afraid of being robbed. I put all my money in my bra, as my mother did, and spent hours in a state of wary anxiety that coexisted seamlessly with a growing sense of liberation.”

— Elena Ferrante

45. “I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts.”

— Elena Ferrante

46. “Temevo che le accadessero cose, belle o brutte, senza che io fossi presente. Era un timore vecchio, un timore che non mi era mai passato: la paura che, perdendomi pezzi della sua vita, perdesse intensita’ e centralita’ la mia.”

— Elena Ferrante

47. “I doubt that work ennobles man and I am absolutely certain that it does not ennoble woman.”

— Elena Ferrante

48. “In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.”

— Elena Ferrante

49. “En los cuentos se hace lo que se quiere y en la vida real se hace lo que se puede.”

— Elena Ferrante

50. “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