Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 10

51. “La guardavo dalla finestra, sentivo che la sua forma precedente s’era rotta e ripensavo a quel brano bellissimo della lettera, al rame crepato e accartocciato. Era un’immagine che ormai utilizzavo di continuo, ogni volta che avvertivo una frattura dentro di lei o dentro di me. Sapevo – forse speravo – che nessuna forma avrebbe mai potuto contenere Lila e che presto o tardi avrebbe spaccato tutto un’altra volta.”

— Elena Ferrante

52. “That even if we’re constantly tempted to lower our guard – out of love, or weariness, or sympathy, or kindness – we women shouldn’t do it. We can lose from one moment to the next everything that we have achieved.”

— Elena Ferrante

53. “Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite.”

— Elena Ferrante

54. “There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.”

— Elena Ferrante

55. “She was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being all her own, that was still obscure to her.”

— Elena Ferrante

56. “The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn’t find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as if she had never had it.”

— Elena Ferrante

57. “Is it so easy – I thought – to die in the life of the people we can’t live without?”

— Elena Ferrante

58. “One night my mother said to me: “Your father is younger than you. You’re growing up and he’s still a child. He’ll remain a child forever, an extraordinarily intelligent child hypnotized by his games. If you don’t keep an eye on him, he gets hurt. I should have understood him as a girl, but then he seemed to me a grown man.”

— Elena Ferrante

59. “She was like the full moon when it crouches behind the forest and the branches scribble on its face.”

— Elena Ferrante

60. “I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows.”

— Elena Ferrante

61. “To write, you have to want something to survive you. I don’t even have the desire to live, I’ve never had it strongly the way you have. If I could eliminate myself now, while we’re speaking, I’d be more than happy. Imagine if I’m going to start writing.”

— Elena Ferrante

62. “I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness.”

— Elena Ferrante

63. “I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes.”

— Elena Ferrante

64. “We were twelve years old, but we walked along the hot streets of the neighborhood, amid the dust and flies that the occasional old trucks stirred up as they passed, like two old ladies taking the measure of lives of disappointment, clinging tightly to each other. No one understood us, only we two – I thought – understood one another.”

— Elena Ferrante

65. “Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.”

— Elena Ferrante

66. “In my spare time I didn’t go out, I sat and read novels I got from the library: Grazia Deledda, Pirandello, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky.”

— Elena Ferrante

67. “Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life.”

— Elena Ferrante

68. “Buoni o cattivi, gli uomini credono tutti che a ogni loro impresa devi metterli su un altare come san Giorgio che ammazza il drago.”

— Elena Ferrante

69. “Because what is the face, what finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise, rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature.”

— Elena Ferrante

70. “Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them.”

— Elena Ferrante

71. “I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic – if we can call it that – between high and low. Maybe it’s because I was not born or brought up in affluence.”

— Elena Ferrante

72. “I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don’t recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that’s all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.”

— Elena Ferrante

73. “We had the same sensitivity to beautiful things, the same need to enjoy them, the same need to search for the right words to say how sweet the night was, how magical the moon, how the sea sparkled, how two souls were able to meet and recognize each other in the darkness, in the fragrant air.”

— Elena Ferrante

74. “Individuals and cities without love are a danger to themselves and to others.”

— Elena Ferrante

75. “Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”

— Elena Ferrante

76. “Nino has something that’s eating him inside, like Lila, and it’s a gift and a suffering; they aren’t content, they never give in, they fear what is happening around them.”

— Elena Ferrante

77. “Religion will disappear from men’s consciousness when, finally, we have constructed a world of equals, without class distinctions, and with a sound of scientific conception of society and of life.”

— Elena Ferrante

78. “The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.”

— Elena Ferrante

79. “Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object.”

— Elena Ferrante

80. “He’s marrying me to have a faithful servant, that’s the reason all men get married.”

— Elena Ferrante

81. “At the fourth flight Lila did something unexpected. She stopped to wait for me, and when I reached her she gave me her hand. This gesture changed everything between us forever.”

— Elena Ferrante

82. “She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in this world.”

— Elena Ferrante

83. “I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.”

— Elena Ferrante

84. “Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school? Or had she brought me back in such a hurry so that I would avoid punishment? Or – I wonder today – did she want at different moments both things?”

— Elena Ferrante

85. “A broken clock that, because its metal heart continued to beat, was now breaking the time of everything else.”

— Elena Ferrante

86. “But the happy ending has to do with the tricks of the narrative, not with life, or even love, which is an uncontrollable, changeable feeling, with nasty surprises that are alien to the happy ending.”

— Elena Ferrante

87. “The solitude of women’s minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it’s a waste to be separated from each other without procedures, without tradition.”

— Elena Ferrante

88. “As long as one writes only for oneself, writing is a free act by means of which, to use an oxymoron, one secretly opens oneself.”

— Elena Ferrante

89. “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. To say : I am your history, you begin from me, listen to me, it could be useful to you.”

— Elena Ferrante

90. “Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. I did so then, and finally it seemed that I had only come up against yet another proof of how splendid and shadowy our friendship was, how long and complicated Lila’s suffering had been, how it still endured and would endure forever.”

— Elena Ferrante

91. “That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelesness is what most frightened her.”

— Elena Ferrante

92. “I let his rose wither in a vase on my desk, a vase painfully empty of flowers since the long-ago time when, on my birthday, Mario would give me a cattleya, in imitation of Swann. In the evening the flower was already black and bent on its stem. I threw it in the trash.”

— Elena Ferrante

93. “One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.”

— Elena Ferrante

94. “That year it seemed to me that I expanded like pizza dough.”

— Elena Ferrante

95. “Good feelings are fragile, with me love doesn’t last. Love for a man doesn’t last, not even love for a child, it soon gets a hole in it. You look in the hole and you see the nebula of good intentions mixed up with the nebula of bad.”

— Elena Ferrante

96. “Ah, the violence: tearing, killing, ripping. Lila, between fascination and horror, spoke to me in a mixture of dialect, Italian, and very educated quotations that she had taken from who knows where and remembered by heart. The entire planet, she said, is a big Fosso Carbonario.”

— Elena Ferrante

97. “When the task we give ourselves has the urgency of passion, there’s nothing that can keep us from completing it.”

— Elena Ferrante

98. “The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I waited in silence.”

— Elena Ferrante

99. “And no one knew better than I did what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men; I had done it, I was doing it.”

— Elena Ferrante

100. “Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don’t want to think about the rest. Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.”

— Elena Ferrante