Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

231. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

235. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

237. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

239. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

241. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

243. “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

244. “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

250. “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