Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

103. “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

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

— 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. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

121. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

126. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

132. “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

133. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

140. “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

141. “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

142. “I feel like the knight in an ancient romance as, wrapped in his shining armor, after performing a thousand astonishing feats throughout the world, he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdues and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

144. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

146. “You wanted to write novels, I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality.”

— Elena Ferrante

147. “Lila appeared in my life in first grade and immediately impressed me because she was very bad.”

— Elena Ferrante

148. “I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured.”

— Elena Ferrante

149. “The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere.”

— Elena Ferrante

150. “Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense.”

— Elena Ferrante