Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “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

452. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

454. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

457. “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

458. “Although I imposed on myself an appearance of self-assurance and an iron discipline, I gave in continuously, with painful pleasure, to waves of unhappiness.”

— Elena Ferrante

459. “I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn’t it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?”

— Elena Ferrante

460. “Esigeva che svilissi gli amanti recenti dimostrandogli che il mio unico desiderio era tornare a essere penetrata da lui. Voleva insomma riaffermare il suo primato, poi di sicuro sarebbe di nuovo sparito.”

— Elena Ferrante

461. “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

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. “Il giorno seguente partii per Venezia insieme a Ida. In treno ci ripromettemmo di diventare adulte come a nessuna era mai successo.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

465. “Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me.”

— Elena Ferrante

466. “In the end she read it. It seemed to me that she shrank, as if I had unloaded a weight on her. And I had the impression that she was making a painful effort to free from some corner of herself the old Lila, the one who read, wrote, drew, made plans spontaneously – the naturalness of an instinctive reaction. When she succeeded, everything seemed pleasantly light.”

— Elena Ferrante

467. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

469. “Zie je, in sprookjes doe je wat je wilt, in de werkelijkheid alleen wat je kunt.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

471. “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

472. “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

473. “Yo me siento como el caballero de una novela antigua que, encerrado en su armadura resplandeciente, tras acometer mil empresas prodigiosas por el mundo, se topa con un pastor harapiento, desnutrido, que sin apartarse nunca del pastizal, con portentoso coraje doblega y domina a horribles bestias con sus propias manos.”

— Elena Ferrante

474. “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

475. “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

476. “But her husband was sleeping, he had fallen asleep as if wrapped in a magic cape.”

— Elena Ferrante

477. “Non era riuscito a stare zitto, l’amicizia tra maschi ha i suoi patti non scritti ma solidi, non come quella tra femmine.”

— Elena Ferrante

478. “When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it.”

— Elena Ferrante

479. “If Vittoria really is that, I thought, discouraged, then she is ugly, she has the ugliness of banality.”

— Elena Ferrante

480. “Everything that could happen between us had happened, the rest was only complications.”

— Elena Ferrante

481. “But what my less easily verbalized emotions recorded under the word Caserta was a spinning nausea, vertigo, and a lack of air.”

— Elena Ferrante

482. “Literary genres are safe areas, solid platforms. There I can place a pale sketch of a story and practise with calm, wary pleasure. But really I am waiting for my brain to get distracted, to slip up, for other I’s – many – outside the margins to join together, take my hand, begin to pull me with the writing where I’m afraid to go, where it hurts me to go, where, if I go too far, I won’t necessarily know how to get back.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

484. “Yes, yes, resign yourself to what you are, each on his own path.”

— Elena Ferrante

485. “The relationship between money and the possession of things had disappointed her.”

— Elena Ferrante

486. “Finally she said something that I would never have had the courage to utter: “Look, Marcello tried in every possible way to buy me but no one is going to buy me.”

— Elena Ferrante

487. “On the other hand I wasn’t really depressed. I felt, rather, as if I had left myself somewhere and was no longer able to find myself: I was worn out, that is, by movements that were too quick and barely coordinated, by the urgency of one who is searching everywhere and has no time to waste.”

— Elena Ferrante

488. “The struggle is due to the fact that the present – the entire present – even that of the “I” who writes, letter by letter – can’t maintain with clarity the thought-vision, which always comes before, is always the past, and therefore tends to be blotted out.”

— Elena Ferrante

489. “He had combed his hair in a way that revealed his broad forehead, framed by thick hair and eyebrows. His face had become thinner, and the prominent lines of the nose, the mouth, the cheekbones formed a design more pleasing than I remembered. He looked ten years younger, the heaviness of his hips, of his chest, of his stomach had disappeared, he even seemed taller.”

— Elena Ferrante

490. “The conclusion we drew from this convinced us that it was best to do everything on purpose, deliberately, so that you would know what to expect.”

— Elena Ferrante

491. “I left. Just now that I was becoming a writer, there was no one in the entire neighborhood capable of saying: What an extraordinary thing you’ve done.”

— Elena Ferrante

492. “Carracci’s possessions, she, too, was Carracci’s possession.”

— Elena Ferrante

493. “I’m still fascinated by how our brains elaborates strategies and carries them out without revealing them. To say that it’s a matter of the unconscious seems to me approximate, maybe even hypocritical.”

— Elena Ferrante

494. “Such persistence in memorizing fashionable jargon, wasted effort. I had been conditioned by my education, which had shaped my mind, my voice.”

— Elena Ferrante

495. “Is it possible that in all those years she left me nothing of herself, or, worse, that I didn’t want to keep anything of her? It is. This.”

— Elena Ferrante

496. “I like her, Mamma, you were right to have her come. She smells nice, just like a corpse.”

— Elena Ferrante

497. “All the more reason, then, to wonder why I had confessed what was so much my own to strangers, people very different from me, who would therefore never be able to understand my reasons, and who surely, at that moment, were speaking ill of me. I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t forgive myself, I felt I had been flushed out.”

— Elena Ferrante

498. “We were, in short, on the side of the violation, but only because it reaffirmed the value of the rule.”

— Elena Ferrante

499. “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

500. “Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote. I remember the dialect on my mother’s lips when she lost that gentle cadence and yelled at us, poisoned by her unhappiness: I can’t take you anymore, I can’t take any more.”

— Elena Ferrante