Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 10

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

— Elena Ferrante

152. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

155. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

166. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “Today I know what I felt, but then I didn’t understand. At that instant I had only an unpleasant impression, as if he had given the signal and from then on all I could do was to sink by degrees into repugnance. In reality I felt above all a blaze of hatred toward myself, because I was there, because I had no excuses, because it was I who had decided to come, because it seemed to me that I could not retreat.”

— Elena Ferrante

184. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

193. “He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.”

— 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. “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

196. “Gone was the pleasure of re-educating my voice, my gestures, my way of dressing and walking, as if I were competing for the prize of best disguise, the mask worn so well that it was almost a face.”

— Elena Ferrante

197. “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

198. “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

199. “So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him.”

— Elena Ferrante

200. “We grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.”

— Elena Ferrante