Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

454. “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

455. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

457. “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

458. “As for me, it’s hard to say in what tangle of feelings I found myself. I always defended Lila, and I liked doing so, I liked to hear myself speak with the authority of one who is studying difficult subjects.”

— Elena Ferrante

459. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

463. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

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. “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. “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

475. “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

476. “Volevo scrivere storie piene di spifferi.”

— 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. “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

483. “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

484. “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

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

— 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. “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

488. “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

489. “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

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

— 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. “I am in danger of going deaf, mute, and turning nihilistic thanks to the countless failures and the unpredictability of rare successes.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

494. “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

495. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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