Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

454. “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

455. “I don’t want my mother to die worrying about her sons.” “Comfort her.” “How.” She smiled. “With lies. Lies are better than tranquilizers.”

— Elena Ferrante

456. “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

457. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

462. “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

463. “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

464. “That answer, as Lila’s answers always were, always had been, though intended to be conciliatory, had something arrogant, scornful, about it, which made Pinuccia even angrier.”

— Elena Ferrante

465. “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

466. “Life can have an ironic geometry. Starting from the age of thirteen or fourteen I had aspired to a bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life, cultured and reflective. Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me. I didn’t think the city could contain life forms different from those I had known as a child, violent or sensually lazy, tinged with sentimental vulgarity or obtusely fortified in defense of their own wretched degradation.”

— Elena Ferrante

467. “Finally she cried with rage and at the same time maternal pride, “What happened when I conceived you, an accident, a hiccup, a convulsion, the lights went out, a bulb blew, the basin of water fell off the night table? Certainly there must have been something, if you were born so intolerable, so different from the others.”

— Elena Ferrante

468. “That fact remains that I, who had successfully completed a theological correspondence course, raised my hand and said that the human condition was so obviously exposed to the blind fury of chance that to trust in a God, a Jesus, the Holy Spirit – this last a completely superfluous entity, it was there only to make up a trinity, notoriously nobler than the mere binomial father-son – was the same thing as collecting trading cards while the city burns in the fires of hell.”

— Elena Ferrante

469. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

472. “For children parents are always a burden. But parents who draw too much attention to themselves are intolerable.”

— Elena Ferrante

473. “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

474. “I had to accept myself outside of her.”

— Elena Ferrante

475. “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

476. “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

477. “So? Better to give up? No, the master answers, you don’t have to throw everything away: it’s arduous to speak truthfully, but you do your best.”

— Elena Ferrante

478. “Eu nu cheltui o lira daca nu cred ca pot sa scot o suta.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

480. “There’s nothing to be done about it, Giovanna, you really are like my sister.”

— Elena Ferrante

481. “As usual she was taking on the job of sticking a pin in my heart not to stop it but to make it beat harder.”

— Elena Ferrante

482. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

484. “You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn’t happen to the women important to them and that – this was the idea they had grown up with – they had to protect her.”

— Elena Ferrante

485. “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

486. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

489. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

491. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

495. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

497. “I’m dead, but I’m fine.”

— Elena Ferrante

498. “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

499. “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

500. “They were pretending to be a mother and father with their baby, but it wasn’t peaceful: they were pretending to have a fight. I stopped. Dede instructed Mirko: You have to hit me, understand? The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.”

— Elena Ferrante