Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2025 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. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

15. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

17. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

19. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

22. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

24. “We were twelve years old, but we walked along the hot streets of the neighborhood, amid the dust and flies that the occasional old trucks stirred up as they passed, like two old ladies taking the measure of lives of disappointment, clinging tightly to each other. No one understood us, only we two – I thought – understood one another.”

— Elena Ferrante

25. “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

26. “She was like the full moon when it crouches behind the forest and the branches scribble on its face.”

— Elena Ferrante

27. “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

28. “Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite.”

— Elena Ferrante

29. “Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them.”

— Elena Ferrante

30. “Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”

— Elena Ferrante

31. “Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life.”

— Elena Ferrante

32. “We had the same sensitivity to beautiful things, the same need to enjoy them, the same need to search for the right words to say how sweet the night was, how magical the moon, how the sea sparkled, how two souls were able to meet and recognize each other in the darkness, in the fragrant air.”

— Elena Ferrante

33. “I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic – if we can call it that – between high and low. Maybe it’s because I was not born or brought up in affluence.”

— Elena Ferrante

34. “Religion will disappear from men’s consciousness when, finally, we have constructed a world of equals, without class distinctions, and with a sound of scientific conception of society and of life.”

— Elena Ferrante

35. “She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in this world.”

— Elena Ferrante

36. “And no one knew better than I did what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men; I had done it, I was doing it.”

— Elena Ferrante

37. “Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. I did so then, and finally it seemed that I had only come up against yet another proof of how splendid and shadowy our friendship was, how long and complicated Lila’s suffering had been, how it still endured and would endure forever.”

— Elena Ferrante

38. “I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. 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

39. “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

40. “That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelesness is what most frightened her.”

— Elena Ferrante

41. “Ah, the violence: tearing, killing, ripping. Lila, between fascination and horror, spoke to me in a mixture of dialect, Italian, and very educated quotations that she had taken from who knows where and remembered by heart. The entire planet, she said, is a big Fosso Carbonario.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

43. “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

44. “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

45. “I have to relearn – I said to myself – the tranquil pace of those who believe they know where they’re going and why.”

— Elena Ferrante

46. “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

47. “Literary work couldn’t seriously force the whirlpool of debris that constituted the real into any grammatical or syntactical order.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

50. “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