Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?”

— Elena Ferrante

152. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

154. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

156. “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

157. “I knew – perhaps I hoped – that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

159. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

164. “Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity.”

— Elena Ferrante

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

178. “Was it Lila who had persuaded Stefano to behave in a way that was making them the most admired and most talked about couple in the neighborhood? Was this her latest invention? Did she want to leave the neighborhood by staying in the neighborhood? Did she want to drag us out of ourselves, tear off the old skin and put on a new one, suitable for what she was inventing?”

— Elena Ferrante

179. “How quickly people changed, with their interests, their feelings. Well-made phrases replaced by well-made phrases, time is a flow of words coherent only in appearance, the one who piles up the most is the one who wins.”

— Elena Ferrante

180. “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

181. “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

182. “You’re really a good girl, poor you.”

— Elena Ferrante

183. “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

184. “One becomes affectionate toward men slowly, whether they coincide or not with whomever in the various phases of life we have taken as the model of a man.”

— Elena Ferrante

185. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

187. “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

188. “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

189. “She deserved him because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not to hope that he would want her.”

— Elena Ferrante

190. “Even as a child, he said, I knew I wasn’t what the others thought but not what I thought, either. I said to myself: I’m another thing, a thing hidden in the veins, it has no name and waits.”

— Elena Ferrante

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “I didn’t know the map of prestige.”

— Elena Ferrante

195. “I felt that there was no irony, it was a real compliment. Then she added with sudden harshness: “I don’t want to read anything else that you write.” “Why?” She thought about it. “Because it hurts me,” and she struck her forehead with her hand and burst out laughing.”

— Elena Ferrante

196. “But not even then did I lose my composure. I continued to proceed with circumspection, as I always had before the accidents of life. The only external sign of my agitation was an inclination to disorder and a weakness in my fingers, and, the more the anguish increased, the harder they found it to close solidly around things.”

— Elena Ferrante

197. “That is the situation in the factory where I work. The union has never gone in and the workers are nothing but poor victims of blackmail, dependent on the law of the owner, that is: I pay you and so I possess you and I possess your life, your family, and everything that surrounds you, and if you don’t do as I say I’ll ruin you.”

— Elena Ferrante

198. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

200. “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