Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me. I didn’t think the city could contain life forms different from those I had known as a child, violent or sensually lazy, tinged with sentimental vulgarity or obtusely fortified in defense of their own wretched degradation. I didn’t even look for them, those forms, in the past or in a possible future. I had run away like a burn victim who, screaming, tears off the burned skin, believing that she is tearing off the burning itself.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

153. “Most of those who came were women, and I was now much criticized, now much praised by opposing groups. At first I was frightened, but Mariarosa interceded with authority and I discovered in myself an unsuspected capacity to summarize disagreement and agreement, choosing in the meantime a role as mediator. I was good at saying in a convincing way: That isn’t exactly what I meant.”

— Elena Ferrante

154. “There are moments when we resort to senseless formulations and advance absurd claims to hide straightforward feelings.”

— Elena Ferrante

155. “When there’s too much silence, she said, so many ideas come to mind, I don’t pay attention. Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause, there are the likable ones and the unlikable, the good and the bad, everything in the end consoles.”

— Elena Ferrante

156. “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

157. “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

158. “It’s hard to explain why, but that regret made me suffer. It seemed to be the sign of a true interest in Lila, something much stronger than the compliments for my discipline as a constant reader. It occurred to me that if Lila had taken out just a single book a year, on that book she would have left her imprint and the teacher would have felt it the moment she returned it, which I left no mark, I embodied only the persistence with which I added volume to volume in no particular order.”

— Elena Ferrante

159. “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

160. “What a complex foamy mixture a couple is. Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn’t die, it doesn’t want to die.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

163. “Watch me until I fall asleep. Watch me always even when you leave Naples. That way I’ll know that you see me and I’m at peace.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

165. “I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

167. “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

168. “It wasn’t innocent blood. To my father nothing about Amalia ever seemed innocent. He, so furious, so bitter and yet so eager for pleasure, so irascible and so egotistical, couldn’t bear that she had a friendly, at times even joyful, relationship with the world. He recognized in it a trace of betrayal.”

— Elena Ferrante

169. “Why, then, even when I advanced, was I so quick to retreat? Why did I always have ready a gracious smile, a happy laugh, when things went badly? Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

171. “The problem is that real change takes a long time, while life hits us right away, now, with all its contradictions.”

— Elena Ferrante

172. “You’re really doing well, it’s the satisfaction you get from school, it’s love,” Lila said to me, and I felt that she was a little sad.”

— Elena Ferrante

173. “What have I done, she thought, dazed by wine, and what is this gold circle, this glittering zero I’ve stuck my finger in.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

175. “In other words, the cultural education of any high-school student should include an introduction to the idea that a writer adapts his writing to ever-changing expressive needs and that a higher or lower note doesn’t mean that the singer has changed.”

— Elena Ferrante

176. “The whole future – I thought – will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning.”

— Elena Ferrante

177. “And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I’m safe?”

— Elena Ferrante

178. “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

179. “But I felt that things were taking a turn for the worse, and I was frightened. Having to stay alert in order to avoid mistakes and confront dangers had exhausted me to the point where sometimes simply the urgency of doing something made me think that I really had done it.”

— Elena Ferrante

180. “I, too, would find out that old age is a brute, ferocious beast.”

— Elena Ferrante

181. “To be born in that city is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.”

— Elena Ferrante

182. “Le parole vanno raramente al posto giusto, e solo per un tempo brevissimo. Per il resto servono a parlare a vanvera, come adesso. O a fingere che sia tutto sotto controllo.”

— Elena Ferrante

183. “A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties.”

— Elena Ferrante

184. “Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.”

— Elena Ferrante

185. “Words for being lost or for being found.”

— Elena Ferrante

186. “Perhaps Lila was right: my book – even though it was having so much success – really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn’t been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.”

— Elena Ferrante

187. “I felt that in me fear could not put down roots, and even the lava, the fiery stream of melting matter that I imagined inside the earthly globe, and the fear it provoked in me, settled in my mind in orderly sentences, in harmonious images, became a pavement of black stones like the streets of Naples, a pavement where I was always and no matter what the center.”

— Elena Ferrante

188. “Disse che la faccia schifosa delle cose non bastava a scrivere un romanzo: senza fantasia non pareva una faccia vera, ma una maschera.”

— Elena Ferrante

189. “What did I care anymore about his political opinions, about Pasquale and Nadia, about the death of Ulrike Meinhof, the birth of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the electoral advances of the Communist Party? The world had retreated. I felt sunk inside myself, inside my flesh, which seemed to me not only the sole dwelling possible but also the only material for which it was worthwhile to struggle.”

— Elena Ferrante

190. “As for infidelities, he said, if you don’t find out about them at the right moment they’re of no use: when you’re in love you forgive everything. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. And he went on like that, piling up painful remarks about the blindness of people in love.”

— Elena Ferrante

191. “But I’ve always had a low voice, I can’t yell, the words fall a short distance away like a handful of pebbles thrown by a child.”

— Elena Ferrante

192. “Elena Ferrante is the author of several novels. There is nothing mysterious about her, given how she manifests herself – perhaps even too much – in her own writing, the place where her creative life transpires in absolute fullness.”

— Elena Ferrante

193. “My work stops at publication. If the books don’t contain in themselves their reasons for being – questions and answers – it means I was wrong to have them published.”

— Elena Ferrante

194. “She kept repeating that if she had dedicated herself assiduously to every child in the neighborhood, in a generation everything would change, there would no longer be the smart and the incompetent, the good and the bad. Then she looked at her son and again burst out crying.”

— Elena Ferrante

195. “If I could conceal from myself the impression that the life had been drained out of me like blood and saliva and mucus from a patient during an operation, maybe I could deceive Mario as well.”

— Elena Ferrante

196. “A book, an article, could make noise, but ancient warriors before the battle also made noise, and if it wasn’t accompanied by real force and immeasurable violence it was only theater.”

— Elena Ferrante

197. “Don’t be timid. You’re a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present.”

— Elena Ferrante

198. “Meanwhile, to consolidate a climate of benevolence, I tried to return to normal activities, like a sick person who has been in the hospital for a long time and, partly to overcome the fear of falling ill again, wants to reanchor himself to the life of the healthy.”

— Elena Ferrante

199. “Let’s write one together,” Lila said once, and that filled me with joy.”

— Elena Ferrante

200. “You know how children are, sometimes they love you by cuddling you, other times by trying to remake you from the start, reinvent you, as if they thought you were badly brought up and they had to teach you how to get on in the world, what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to see, the words you should use and those you shouldn’t because they’re old now, no one says that anymore.”

— Elena Ferrante