Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me: the fear that, in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance. And the fact that she didn’t answer emphasized that preoccupation. However hard I tried in my letters to communicate the privilege of the days in Ischia, my river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full.”

— Elena Ferrante

102. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

104. “Parole: con quelle si fa e si disfa come si vuole.”

— Elena Ferrante

105. “It was predictable, of course, but now that a date had been fixed, March 12th, it was as if I had been strolling absentmindedly and banged into a door.”

— Elena Ferrante

106. “Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.”

— Elena Ferrante

107. “La culpa la tiene tu cabeza que no sabe calmarse, busca sin cesar una manera de funcionar.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

109. “For her whole life she would sacrifice to him every quality of her own, and he wouldn’t even be aware of the sacrifice, he would be surrounded by the wealth of feeling, intelligence, imagination that were hers, without knowing what to do with them, he would ruin them.”

— Elena Ferrante

110. “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

111. “The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.”

— Elena Ferrante

112. “Estrangement and belonging, an effect of distance and closeness at the same time.”

— Elena Ferrante

113. “I concluded that first of all I had to understand better what I was. Investigate my nature as a woman. I had been excessive, I had striven to give myself male capacities. I thought I had to know everything, be concerned with everything. What did I care about politics, about struggles. I wanted to make a good impression on men, be at their level. At the level of what, of their reason, most unreasonable.”

— Elena Ferrante

114. “Books are written so their authors can be heard, not so that they remain silent.”

— Elena Ferrante

115. “What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him.”

— Elena Ferrante

116. “Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote.”

— Elena Ferrante

117. “Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me... I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.”

— Elena Ferrante

118. “The waves rolled in like blue metal tubes carrying an egg white of foam on their peaks, then broke in a thousand glittering splinters and came up to the street with an oh of wonder and fear from those watching.”

— Elena Ferrante

119. “When I opened my eyes again, five hours later, at seven o’clock on Saturday August 4th, I had trouble getting my bearings. The hardest day of the ordeal of my abandonment was about to begin, but I didn’t know it yet.”

— Elena Ferrante

120. “Lila shook her head skeptically. She was trying to understand, we were both trying to understand, and understanding was something that we loved to do.”

— Elena Ferrante

121. “Our world was like that, full of words that killed: croup, tetanus, typhus, gas, war, lathe, rubble, work, bombardment, bomb, tuberculosis, infection. With these words and those years I bring back the many fears that accompanied me all my life.”

— Elena Ferrante

122. “You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.”

— Elena Ferrante

123. “I soon discovered that I was getting used to being happy and unhappy at the same time, as if that were the new, inevitable law of my life.”

— Elena Ferrante

124. “The girl, perhaps without even realizing it, and who knows for how long, had been assessing the power of her swaying body, her restless eyes, on my husband; and he looked at her as one looks from a gray area at a white wall struck by the sun.”

— Elena Ferrante

125. “I began to weep with loneliness. What was I, who was I? I felt pretty again, my pimples were gone, the sun and the sea had made me slimmer, and yet the person I liked and whom I wished to be liked by showed no interest in me.”

— Elena Ferrante

126. “What’s got into me? Do I want children? Do I want to be a mamma, nursing and singing lullabies? Marriage plus pregnancy? And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I’m safe?”

— Elena Ferrante

127. “Yes, it’s Lila who makes writing difficult. My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck.”

— Elena Ferrante

128. “Depressed I went out into the heat that lay on the neighborhood like a hand swollen with fever in that season, and made my way to the library.”

— Elena Ferrante

129. “Maybe I should tell her that things without a meaning are the most beautiful ones.”

— Elena Ferrante

130. “To tolerate existence, we lie, and we lie above all to ourselves. Sometimes we tell ourselves lovely tales, sometimes petty lies. Falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reflection, they dilute the horrors of our time, they even save us from ourselves.”

— Elena Ferrante

131. “It seemed that everyone was shouting too loudly and moving too quickly. This sensation was accompanied by nausea, and she had had the impression that something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around everyone and everything forever, but imperceptible, was breaking down the outlines of persons and things and revealing itself.”

— Elena Ferrante

132. “That last phrase, the elegant jump from malicious gossip to compliment, seemed to me so very successful that I thought of adult normality precisely as an art of that type. I had something to learn.”

— Elena Ferrante

133. “This is what awaits me, I thought. Evenings like this. Appearing at the house of strangers, marked as a woman waiting to remake her life.”

— Elena Ferrante

134. “We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.”

— Elena Ferrante

135. “You can be hurt only if you love someone. But I don’t love anyone.”

— Elena Ferrante

136. “Lila is right, one writes not so much to write, one writes to inflict pain on those who wish to inflict pain. The pain of words against the pain of kicks and punches and the instruments of death.”

— Elena Ferrante

137. “Who says I’m vain?” “The comparison: your friend isn’t. But I’m sorry for her, vanity is a resource. If you’re vain you pay attention to yourself and your affairs.”

— Elena Ferrante

138. “How can I explain to this woman – I thought – that from the age of six I’ve been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?”

— Elena Ferrante

139. “I had the impression that, although I was absorbing much of that sight, many things, too many, were scattering around me without letting me grasp them.”

— Elena Ferrante

140. “What is clear to me, always, is that the writing must never lose sight of truth as its ultimate goal. Page after page, the drive to capture what is true, and not what resembles the truth, shapes the work. If, even for a few passages, the tone becomes false – that is, too studied, too limpid, too regimented, too well-phrased – I am obliged to stop and to figure out where I started to go wrong. If I can’t, I throw everything away.”

— Elena Ferrante

141. “We don’t know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.”

— Elena Ferrante

142. “El mundo da vueltas, menos mal, si se cae, se rompe.”

— Elena Ferrante

143. “Bugie, bugie, gli adulti le vietano, intanto ne dicono tante.”

— Elena Ferrante

144. “It’s relaxing, I thought, I was wrong not to come sooner. I had a friend of my age with her own house, full of opulent, orderly things. That.”

— Elena Ferrante

145. “Today I feel some uneasiness in recalling how much I suffered, I have no sympathy for myself of that time.”

— Elena Ferrante

146. “Accept that to be adult is to disappear, is to learn to hide to the point of vanishing?”

— Elena Ferrante

147. “In order not to cut out a large part of one’s private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.”

— Elena Ferrante

148. “I hated the idea that he knew everything about me while I knew little or nothing of him. I felt like someone who is blind and knows that he is being observed by the very people he would like to spy on in every detail.”

— Elena Ferrante

149. “And they thought that what had happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too.”

— Elena Ferrante

150. “Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?”

— Elena Ferrante