Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “My compliance without participation began to disorientate him. I thought, as always in those circumstances, that I should pretend a yearning and uncontrolled passion or push him away. But I didn’t dare to either one or the other: I was afraid I would throw up, because the result would be earthquake-like waves. I had only to wait.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

206. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet of my mind. I can’t stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, break.”

— Elena Ferrante

212. “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

213. “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

214. “She expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but – further – she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, the confusion of the oral.”

— Elena Ferrante

215. “I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.”

— Elena Ferrante

216. “Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?”

— Elena Ferrante

217. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

219. “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

220. “No, to produce ideas you don’t have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. 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

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

— Elena Ferrante

222. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

228. “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

229. “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

230. “He had rid himself so fiercely of memory, language, the capacity to find meaning that it seemed obvious the hatred he had for himself, for his own skin, for his moods, for his thoughts and words, for the brutal corner of the world that had enveloped him.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

233. “Evidently what in the fiction of the story serves in all innocence to reach the heart of the reader becomes an abomination for one who feels the echo of the facts she has really lived.”

— Elena Ferrante

234. “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

235. “I wanted him to see in that plate of pasta everything that, by leaving, he would no longer be able to look at, or touch, or caress, listen to, smell: never again.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

237. “In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed.”

— Elena Ferrante

238. “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

239. “There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors.”

— Elena Ferrante

240. “In fiction we say and recognize things about ourselves, which, for the sake of propriety, we ignore or don’t talk about in reality.”

— Elena Ferrante

241. “Such tensions without sense push us to formulate questions of meaning.”

— Elena Ferrante

242. “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

243. “Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite. And there was nothing in her appearance that acted as a corrective.”

— Elena Ferrante

244. “We haven’t had an office open to the public for at least ten years,” he answered. “And if I want to complain?” “You do it by telephone.” “And if I want to spit in someone’s face?” He advised me politely to try the office in Via Confienza, a hundred yards farther on.”

— Elena Ferrante

245. “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

246. “In the crush men used the women to play silent games with themselves. One stared ironically at a dark-haired girl to see if she would lower her gaze. One, with his eyes, caught a bit of lace between two buttons of a blouse, or harpooned a strap. Others passed the time looking out the window into cars for a glimpse of an uncovered leg, the play of muscles as a foot pushed break or clutch, a hand absentmindedly scratching the inside of a thigh.”

— Elena Ferrante

247. “We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us.”

— Elena Ferrante

248. “We told each other everything, even the little things, and were happy.”

— Elena Ferrante

249. “Had it really been so wonderful? I knew very well that at that time, too, there had been shame. And uneasiness, and humiliation, and disgust: accept, submit, force yourself. Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante