Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Let’s write one together,” Lila said once, and that filled me with joy.”

— Elena Ferrante

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “Disgust at the torments that shackle us, the chains of heavy life.”

— Elena Ferrante

208. “A lo mejor es que cuando uno se enamora de una persona, no la somete antes a un examen para comprobar si sabe escribir una carta de amor.”

— Elena Ferrante

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “But when do people ever speak truthfully and when do things ever happen unexpectedly? You know better than me that it’s all a fraud and one thing follows another and then another.”

— Elena Ferrante

213. “There were entire libraries separating him and Antonio, but they were similar.”

— Elena Ferrante

214. “Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive.”

— Elena Ferrante

215. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

217. “In hyperbolic tones he listed the catastrophes that in his view were approaching: one, the decline of the revolutionary subject par excellence, the working class; two, the definitive dispersion of the political patrimony of socialists and Communists, who were already perverted by their daily quarrel over which was playing the role of capital’s crutch; three, the end of every hypothesis of change, what was there was there and we would have to adapt to it.”

— Elena Ferrante

218. “My mother always saw evil where, to my great annoyance, it was sooner or later discovered that evil really was, and her crossed eye seemed made purposely to identify the secret motives of the neighborhood.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

220. “I devoted myself to the house, to the children, to Pietro. Not once did I think of having Clelia back or of replacing her with someone else. Again, I took on everything, and certainly I did it to put myself in a stupor. But it happened without effort, without bitterness, as if I had suddenly discovered that this was the right way of spending one’s life, and a part of me whispered: Enough of those silly notions in your head.”

— Elena Ferrante

221. “In quale disordine vivevamo, quanti frammenti di noi stessi schizzavano via come se vivere fosse esplodere in schegge.”

— Elena Ferrante

222. “She went like that saint who, although she still has her head on her shoulders, is carrying it in her hands, as if it had already been cut off.”

— Elena Ferrante

223. “Even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina.”

— Elena Ferrante

224. “Translation is our salvation: it draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.”

— Elena Ferrante

225. “But stamped on her face was also regret that she had been wrong in her assessment. In those weeks she felt humiliated at having always ascribed a power to things that in the current hierarchies were insignificant: the alphabet, writing, books. Only then – I think today – did she, who seemed so disillusioned, so adult, come to the end of her childhood.”

— Elena Ferrante

226. “She spoke with a different sort of determination, calmer, as if it were no longer necessary to fight to the death for every little thing.”

— Elena Ferrante

227. “And to keep under control the anxieties of change I had, finally, taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm, my voice held back in my throat so that I would not make a spectacle of myself.”

— Elena Ferrante

228. “I would have the small happinesses of the unmarried girl in glasses who spends her life studying: a walk, being taken by the hand.”

— Elena Ferrante

229. “Places of the imagination are visited in books. Seen in reality they may be hard to recognize; they are disappointing, they might even seem fake.”

— Elena Ferrante

230. “I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful.”

— Elena Ferrante

231. “Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life. I understood suddenly why I hadn’t had Nino, why Lila had had him. I wasn’t capable of entrusting myself to true feelings. I didn’t know how to be drawn beyond the limits. I didn’t possess that emotional power that had driven Lila to do all she could to enjoy that day and that night. I stayed behind, waiting.”

— Elena Ferrante

232. “I gave in continuously, with painful pleasure, to waves of unhappiness.”

— Elena Ferrante

233. “We are tornadoes that pick up fragments with the most varied historical and biological origins. This makes of us – thankfully – fickle agglomerations that maintain a fragile equilibrium, that are inconsistent and complex, that can’t be reduced to any fixed framework that does not inevitably leave out a great deal. Which is why the more effective stories resemble ramparts from which one can gaze out at everything that has been excluded.”

— Elena Ferrante

234. “I recognized in them what I had never had and, I now knew, would always lack. What was it? I wasn’t able to say precisely: the training, perhaps, to feel that the questions of the world were deeply connected to me; the capacity to feel them as crucial and not purely as information to display at an exam; a mental conformation that didn’t reduce everything to my own individual battle, to the effort to be successful.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

236. “Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.”

— Elena Ferrante

237. “But the condition of wife had enclosed her in a sort of glass container, like a sailboat sailing with sails unfurled in an inaccessible place, without the sea.”

— Elena Ferrante

238. “Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence.”

— Elena Ferrante

239. “For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first.”

— Elena Ferrante

240. “Everything is interesting if you know how to work on it.”

— Elena Ferrante

241. “It was as if she wanted to take the power away even from the realistic possibility of violent death by reducing it to words, to a form that could be controlled.”

— Elena Ferrante

242. “Next to her, in the place where we were born, I was only a decoration, that is, I bore witness to Lila’s merits. Those who had known us from birth attributed to her, to the force of her attraction, the fact that the neighborhood could have on its streets an esteemed person like me.”

— Elena Ferrante

243. “The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.”

— Elena Ferrante

244. “When the baby emerged and I saw her, black-haired, a violet organism that, full of energy, writhed and wailed, I felt a physical pleasure so piercing that I still know no other pleasure that compares to it.”

— Elena Ferrante

245. “While Otto ran here and there, carefully choosing places to urinate, I felt over every inch of my body the scratches of sexual abandonment, the danger of drowning in scorn for myself and nostalgia for him. I got up and went back along the path; I whistled again, and waited for Otto to return.”

— Elena Ferrante

246. “It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.”

— Elena Ferrante

247. “She’s lucky to be so loved, to love. Lucky to be adored for what she is and for what she invents. Now that she’s given her brother what he wanted, now that she’s taken him out of danger, surely she’ll invent something else. So I don’t want to lose sight of her. Something will happen.”

— Elena Ferrante

248. “To write, you have to want something to survive you.”

— Elena Ferrante

249. “Success depends on the capacity to manipulate the obvious with calculated precision.”

— Elena Ferrante

250. “But then, in Piazza di Carbonara, from stones she moved on to weapons, and it became the place where men fought to the last drop of blood. Beggars and gentlemen and princes hurried to see people killing each other in revenge. When some handsome youth fell, pierced by a blade beaten on the anvil of death, immediately beggars, bourgeois citizens, kings and queens offered applause that rose to the stars.”

— Elena Ferrante