Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Money gave even more force to the impression that what I lacked she had, and vice versa, in a continuous game of exchanges and reversals that, now happily, now painfully, made us indispensable to each other.”

— Elena Ferrante

452. “Hay situaciones en que las elecciones te vienen impuestas.”

— Elena Ferrante

453. “Soon she’ll start yelling, I thought, soon she’ll hit her, trying to break that bond. Instead, the bond will become more twisted, will strengthen in remorse, in the humiliation of having shown herself in public to be an unaffectionate mother, not the mother of church or the Sunday supplements.”

— Elena Ferrante

454. “Lila’s world, as usual, rapidly superimposed itself on mine. Everything that I had written in July and August seemed to me trivial, I was seized by a frenzy to redeem myself.”

— Elena Ferrante

455. “Life without seeing and without speaking, without speaking and listening, life without a covering, with a container is shapeless.”

— Elena Ferrante

456. “It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of on required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing.”

— Elena Ferrante

457. “Volevo scrivere storie piene di spifferi.”

— Elena Ferrante

458. “Writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned. Writing is getting comfortable with everything that has already been written – great literature and commercial literature, if useful, the novel-essay and the screenplay – and in turn becoming, within the limits of one’s own dizzying, crowded individuality, something written. Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune.”

— Elena Ferrante

459. “How and when words escape from books and the books end up seeming like empty graves is something to think about.”

— Elena Ferrante

460. “She was suggesting that I separate also from my third child. She seemed to be saying: Imma would be better off and so would you. I replied: If Imma leaves me, too, my life will no longer have meaning. But she smiled: Where is it written that lives should have meaning?”

— Elena Ferrante

461. “See where that argument with the religion teacher led, every choice has its history, so many moments of our existence are shoved into a corner, waiting for an outlet, and in the end the outlet arrives. But I would have been exaggerating, in reality it was much simpler.”

— Elena Ferrante

462. “The odor was of lunchtime or dinnertime, when, coming from every doorway, the smells of the various dishes mingle in the stairwell but are ruined by a stink of mold and cobwebs.”

— Elena Ferrante

463. “She became transparent skin over bones, her eyes drowning in violet wells, her hands damp spider webs.”

— Elena Ferrante

464. “But I did think of leaving my husband, I was looking for the right moment. You wait, you get tired, you start waiting again.”

— Elena Ferrante

465. “And yet now that we were seventeen the substance of time itself no longer seemed fluid but had assumed a gluelike consistency and churned around us like a yellow cream in a confectioner’s machine.”

— Elena Ferrante

466. “Then he added, in an almost threatening tone: Without these rasping hands, professor, not a chair would exist, or a building, a car, nothing, not even you; if we workers stopped working everything would stop, the sky would fall to earth and the earth would shoot up the sky, the plants would take over the cities, the Arno would flood your fine houses, and only those who have always worked would know how to survive, and as for you two, you with all your books, the dogs would tear you to pieces.”

— Elena Ferrante

467. “La lontananza mi distingueva dentro ogni legame e ogni preoccupazione.”

— Elena Ferrante

468. “My job, I thought, is to demonstrate that one can remain healthy. Demonstrate it to myself, no one else. If I am exposed to lizards, I will fight the lizards. If I am exposed to ants, I will fight the ants. If I am exposed to thieves, I will fight the thieves. If I am exposed to myself, I will fight myself.”

— Elena Ferrante

469. “I perceived immediately that none of those young people were there for the pleasure of being together. Behind the good manners were tensions, enmities, and if they could have they would surely have spent the evening in another way. But.”

— Elena Ferrante

470. “But above all I no longer wanted to know if it was strychnine or something else that had killed Otto. The dog had fallen through a hole in the net of events. We leave so many of them, lacerations of negligence, when we put together cause and effect. The essential thing was that the string, the weave that now supported me, should hold. 43.”

— Elena Ferrante

471. “As a girl I had liked obscene language, it gave me a sense of masculine freedom. Now I knew that obscenity could raise sparks of madness if it came from a mouth as controlled as mine. So I closed my eyes, I held my hands and squeezed my eyelids.”

— Elena Ferrante

472. “But at the same time I was grateful for the small dose of humiliation and pain he had inflicted on me. I went around the bed, sat on the edge beside him, and masturbated him. He let me do it, with his eyes closed. He ejaculated without a moan, as if he were feeling no pleasure.”

— Elena Ferrante

473. “What we were at the beginning is only a vague patch of colour contemplated from the edge of what we have become.”

— Elena Ferrante

474. “I know – it stayed in her head without becoming sound – I know what a comfortable life full of good intentions means, you can’t even imagine what real misery is.”

— Elena Ferrante

475. “I thought: not even Lila, in spite of everything, has managed to escape from my mother’s world.”

— Elena Ferrante

476. “I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story yet in fact are nothing, nothing of mine, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion, only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even she who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.”

— Elena Ferrante

477. “It was the word for a disquiet not otherwise definable, it referred to a miscellaneous crowd of things in her head, debris in a muddy water of the brain. The frantumaglia was mysterious, it provoked mysterious actions, it was the source of all suffering not traceable to a single obvious cause.”

— Elena Ferrante

478. “We are flying over a ball of fire.”

— Elena Ferrante

479. “Avevamo dodici anni, ma camminammo a lungo per le vie bollenti del rione, tra la polvere e le mosche che si lasciavano alle spalle i vecchi camion si passaggio, come due vecchiette che fanno il punto delle loro vite piene di delusioni e si tengono strette l’una all’altra.”

— Elena Ferrante

480. “Maybe it’s not all over: even after she’s married, something between us will endure.”

— Elena Ferrante

481. “Roberto the whole time with an attitude.”

— Elena Ferrante

482. “If she wants Marcello Solara, I will resign myself. I love her so much that if she’s happy with someone else I will withdraw and between us everything will remain as it is now. But if she wants me – if she wants me – there’s no help for it, you must give her to me.”

— Elena Ferrante

483. “I hope that in the free time of old age, the wonder will return.”

— Elena Ferrante

484. “I had less success in the courtyard. There only love and boyfriends counted.”

— Elena Ferrante

485. “I liked to discover connections like that, especially if they concerned Lila. I traced lines between moments and events distant from one another, I established convergences and divergences.”

— Elena Ferrante

486. “Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many.”

— Elena Ferrante

487. “I discovered everywhere female automations created by men. There was nothing of ourselves, and the little there was that rose up in protest immediately became material for their manufacturing.”

— Elena Ferrante

488. “Ernest’s mistake is to succeed by prudently respecting the rules of an old, well-known game; Gertrude’s virtue is to succeed by sticking to the old, well-known game but in order to disrupt it and bend it to her purposes.”

— Elena Ferrante

489. “Then I felt as if my thoughts were cut off in the middle, absorbing and yet defective, with an urgent need for verification, for development, yet without conviction, without faith in themselves.”

— Elena Ferrante

490. “Really, go ahead.” “No.”

— Elena Ferrante

491. “Yes, Imma was consoled but only because Lila was introducing her to a permanent stream of splendors and miseries, a cyclical Naples where everything was marvelous and everything became gray and irrational and everything sparkled again, as when a cloud passes over the sun and the sun appears to flee, a timid, pale disk, near extinction, but not look, once the cloud dissolves it’s suddenly dazzling again, so bright you have to shield your eyes with your hand.”

— Elena Ferrante

492. “Both Pasquale and Rino turned out to be surprisingly good dancers, and we learned from them the tango, the waltz, the polka, and the mazurka.”

— Elena Ferrante

493. “Maybe I should erase Lila from myself like a drawing from the blackboard, I thought, for, I think, the first time. I felt fragile, exposed, I couldn’t spend my time following her or discovering that she was following me, either way feeling diminished. I immediately went to find her.”

— Elena Ferrante

494. “Se uno non prova, non cambia niente.”

— Elena Ferrante

495. “Come soffrivo per lei e per me, come mi vergognavo di essere uscita dalla sua pancia di persona scontenta.”

— Elena Ferrante

496. “Maybe I’m not so ugly, I thought, maybe I can’t see myself.”

— Elena Ferrante

497. “Only when we feel the story in each of its moments or places are we able to tell it properly.”

— Elena Ferrante

498. “The better and truer you feel, the farther away you go.”

— Elena Ferrante

499. “They were just like the relations from whom I had fled as a girl. I couldn’t bear them and yet they held me tight, I had them all inside me.”

— Elena Ferrante

500. “He turned to Marirosa, as if irritated by the too private note of our exchange: “Elena is asking what there is to do.” Mariarosa answered cheerfully: “The revolution.” So I assumed a mocking tone, I said: “And in your free time?”

— Elena Ferrante