Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.”

— Elena Ferrante

52. “I’ll give you treasure chests full of gold pieces, I know the value of spending time with you.” I.”

— Elena Ferrante

53. “Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before 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

54. “Le cose brutte che non dici a nessuno diventano cani che ti mangiano la testa di notte mentre dormi.”

— Elena Ferrante

55. “Evocai versi e romanzi come tranquillanti. Forse, pensai, aver studiato mi serve solo a questo: a calmarmi.”

— Elena Ferrante

56. “En los cuentos se hace lo que se quiere y en la vida real se hace lo que se puede.”

— Elena Ferrante

57. “At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.”

— Elena Ferrante

58. “They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.”

— Elena Ferrante

59. “Nowhere is it written that you can’t do it.”

— Elena Ferrante

60. “I doubt that work ennobles man and I am absolutely certain that it does not ennoble woman.”

— Elena Ferrante

61. “She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.”

— Elena Ferrante

62. “How heavy a body that has been traversed by death is, life is light, there’s no need to let anyone make it heavy for us.”

— Elena Ferrante

63. “Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”

— Elena Ferrante

64. “Temevo che le accadessero cose, belle o brutte, senza che io fossi presente. Era un timore vecchio, un timore che non mi era mai passato: la paura che, perdendomi pezzi della sua vita, perdesse intensita’ e centralita’ la mia.”

— Elena Ferrante

65. “In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.”

— Elena Ferrante

66. “For the first time, I left Naples, left Campania. I discovered that I was afraid of everything: afraid of taking the wrong train, afraid of having to pee and not knowing where to do it, afraid that it would be night and I wouldn’t be able to orient myself in an unfamiliar city, afraid of being robbed. I put all my money in my bra, as my mother did, and spent hours in a state of wary anxiety that coexisted seamlessly with a growing sense of liberation.”

— Elena Ferrante

67. “I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts.”

— Elena Ferrante

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “Love in my case is not indispensable to pleasure, nor is respect. Is it possible, therefore, that the disgust, the humiliation begin afterward, when a man subdues you and violates you at his pleasure solely because now you belong to him, love or not, respect or not?”

— Elena Ferrante

98. “I now knew a method of speaking and writing that – by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn’t supposed to fail – sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

100. “I had long since realized that each of us organizes memory as it suits him, I’m still surprised when I do it myself. But it surprised me that one could go so far as to give the facts an arrangement that went against one’s own interests.”

— Elena Ferrante