Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “I am in danger of going deaf, mute, and turning nihilistic thanks to the countless failures and the unpredictability of rare successes.”

— Elena Ferrante

452. “I was secretly convinced that I would truly exist only at the moment when my signature, Elena Greco, appeared in print...”

— Elena Ferrante

453. “If people had been horrified at those who wanted to overthrow the state, now they were disgusted by those who, pretending to serve it, had consumed it, like a fat worm in the apple.”

— Elena Ferrante

454. “They had all known one another a long time, they knew they were complicit victims, and they had no doubt about who the whistleblower was: she, the only one who behaved from the start as if the need to work didn’t go hand in hand with the need to be humiliated.”

— Elena Ferrante

455. “How you like saying you love him.” “Why shouldn’t I like it?” “You’re right, why? I was wrong: it’s pointless to open the eyes of someone in love.”

— Elena Ferrante

456. “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

457. “So much fuss about the greatness of this one and that one, but what virtue is there in being born with certain qualities, it’s like admiring the bingo basket when you shake it and good numbers come out.”

— Elena Ferrante

458. “Studieren galt als ein Trick der pfiffigsten jungen Leute zur Vermeidung harter Arbeit.”

— Elena Ferrante

459. “En los momentos de crisis, con mucha frecuencia las mujeres tratamos de calmarnos escribiendo.”

— Elena Ferrante

460. “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

461. “At those moments I took it for granted that there was not and never would be a manuscript of Lila’s. I had always overestimated her, nothing memorable would emerge from her – something that reassured me and yet truly upset me. I loved Lila. I wanted her to last. But I wanted it to be I who made her last. I thought it was my task. I was convinced that she herself, as a girl, had assigned it to me.”

— Elena Ferrante

462. “Yet here she was insisting that I stay with her, to keep me from who knows what stormy sea, from who knows what abyss or precipice, all dangers that at that moment were represented in her eyes by Antonio. But staying near her meant staying in her world, becoming completely like her. And if I became like her, who would be right for me if not Antonio?”

— Elena Ferrante

463. “Cand o vedeai, emana o stralucire care parea o palma foarte violenta peste fata saraciei din cartier.”

— Elena Ferrante

464. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

466. “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

467. “He’s gone, you’re still here. You’ll no longer enjoy the gleam of his eyes, of his words, but so what? Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness, don’t let yourself break like an ornament, you’re not a knickknack, no woman is a knickknack.”

— Elena Ferrante

468. “She claimed that she was in the service of the workers, and yet, from her room in a house full of books and with a view of the sea, she wanted to command you, she wanted to tell you what you should do with your work, she decided for you, she had the solution ready even if you ended up in the street.”

— Elena Ferrante

469. “Only she can say if, in fact, she has managed to insert herself into this extremely long chain of words to modify my text, to purposely supply the missing links, to unhook others without letting it show, to say of me more than I want, more than I’m able to say.”

— Elena Ferrante

470. “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

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. “I concluded by saying that the world urgently needed to be changed, that there were too many tyrants who kept peoples enslaved. But it should be changed by peaceful means.”

— Elena Ferrante

473. “Lila began to act as if the real world were a backdrop or a chessboard, and you had only to shift a painted screen, move a pawn or two, and you would see that the game, the only thing that really counted, her game, the game of the two of them, could continue to be played.”

— Elena Ferrante

474. “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

475. “Volevo scrivere storie piene di spifferi.”

— Elena Ferrante

476. “The hue itself, moreover, that certain emotions take on is of unimportant duration, the one who is writing knows. As soon as you look for words, the slowness becomes a whirlwind and the colors get mixed together like the colors of different fruits in a blender.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

478. “The daughter of the shoemaker, who had no bosom and didn’t get her period and didn’t even have a boyfriend, became in a few days the most reliable dispenser of advice on affairs of the heart.”

— Elena Ferrante

479. “She said that since then she had been very careful never to forget that we are very crowded beings, full of physics, astrophysics, biology, religion, soul, bourgeoisie, proletariat, capital, work, profit, politics, many harmonious phrases, many unharmonious, the chaos inside and the chaos outside.”

— Elena Ferrante

480. “Blijft het feit dat ik mijn hand opstak en zei dat het menselijke lot zo duidelijk aan de blinde razernij van het toeval was blootgesteld dat jezelf aan een God toevertrouwen hetzelfde was als plaatjes verzamelen terwijl de stad brandt in het hellevuur.”

— Elena Ferrante

481. “She felt alone, she was secretly waiting for a father who wasn’t showing up, she could no longer hold the confusion of that day within the limits of a game.”

— Elena Ferrante

482. “We two are made like that, when we have good thoughts we’re pretty, but we turn ugly with mean ones, we have to get them out of our heads.”

— Elena Ferrante

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

486. “But within a few years I began to feel old age, it was as if I were fading along with the world in which I had established myself.”

— Elena Ferrante

487. “And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.”

— Elena Ferrante

488. “How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they’re at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function.”

— Elena Ferrante

489. “What seemed to interest and absorb her most was that all that filth, all that chaos of broken limbs and dug-out eyes and split heads was then covered – literally covered – by a church dedicated to San Giovanni Battista and by a monastery of Augustinian hermits who had a valuable library. Ah, ah – she laughed – underneath there’s blood and above, God, peace, prayer, and books.”

— Elena Ferrante

490. “I asked myself what I was doing in that car. They were my friends, of course, my boyfriend was there, we were going to Lila’s wedding celebration. But that very celebration confirmed that Lila, the only person I still felt was essential even though our lives had diverged, no longer belonged to us and, without her, every intermediary between me and those youths, that car racing through the streets, was gone.”

— Elena Ferrante

491. “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

492. “The balcony extended over the void like a diving board over a pool.”

— Elena Ferrante

493. “Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause, there are the likable ones and the unlikable, the good and the bad, everything in the end consoles you.”

— Elena Ferrante

494. “I was blind, she a falcon; I had an opaque pupil, she narrowed her eyes, with darting glances that saw more; I clung to her arm, among the shadows, she guided me with a stern gaze.”

— Elena Ferrante

495. “Loving courses together with hating, and I can’t, I can’t manage to solidify myself around any goodwill.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

497. “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

498. “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

499. “With greater or less ability we fabricate fictions not so that the false will seem true but to tell the most unspeakable truth with absolute faithfulness through the fiction.”

— Elena Ferrante

500. “She was submissive, she gave in immediately out of fear of not being liked, it depressed her that she had given in.”

— Elena Ferrante