Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Such tensions without sense push us to formulate questions of meaning.”

— Elena Ferrante

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

259. “Then Pasquale himself began to be silent, defeated by Lila’s capacity to link one thing to another in a chain that tightened around you on all sides.”

— Elena Ferrante

260. “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

261. “Le parole vanno raramente al posto giusto, e solo per un tempo brevissimo. Per il resto servono a parlare a vanvera, come adesso. O a fingere che sia tutto sotto controllo.”

— Elena Ferrante

262. “But her body, seated a few inches from mine on the wooden bench, had manifested no unease. Not even her voice, which had been sure and clear: no. Not a single sign that might lead me to think that she was lying. Thus I had no doubt. She was lying.”

— Elena Ferrante

263. “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

264. “The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.”

— Elena Ferrante

265. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

267. “What I expect from a good story is that it will tell me today what I can’t know from any other source but that story, from its unique way of putting something into words, from the feeling that it implies.”

— Elena Ferrante

268. “It’s only and always the two of us who are involved, she who wants me to give her what nature and circumstances kept, I who can’t give what she demands; she who gets angry at my inadequacy and out of spite wants to reduce me to nothing, as she has done with herself, I who have written for months and months to give her a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn, calm myself.”

— Elena Ferrante

269. “Reading and writing are closed-room activities, which literally take you away from the gaze of others. The greater risk is that they also remove others from your gaze.”

— Elena Ferrante

270. “I’m laughing, I apologized, at the situation, at you, who’ve wanted to kill Nino forever, and at me, who if he showed up now would say to you: Yes, kill him. I’m laughing out of despair, because I’ve never been so offended, because I feel humiliated in a way that I don’t know if you can imagine, because at this moment I’m so ill that I think I’m fainting.”

— Elena Ferrante

271. “Beautiful everywhere, outside and in, male fantasies.”

— Elena Ferrante

272. “I became disenchanted. My first impression, that of finding myself part of a fearless battle, passed. The trepidation at every exam and the joy of passing it with the highest marks had faded. 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

273. “On the page was exactly what I had written, but it was clearer, more immediate. The erasures, the transpositions, the small additions, and, in some way, her handwriting itself gave me the impression that I had escaped from myself and now was running a hundred paces ahead with an energy and also a harmony that the person left behind didn’t know she had.”

— Elena Ferrante

274. “And so, in spite of his virtues, he was a frivolous, superficial man, an animal organism who dripped sweat and fluids and left behind, like the residue of a careless pleasure, living material conceived, nourished, shaped within female bellies.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

276. “Lies are better than tranquilizers.”

— Elena Ferrante

277. “Finally, I spoke of the necessity of recounting frankly every human experience, including, I said emphatically, what seems unsayable and what we do not speak of even to ourselves.”

— Elena Ferrante

278. “Finally he had decided that he had to free Lila, even if at that moment, perhaps, she had no desire to be freed. But – he had said to himself – it takes time for people to understand what’s good and what’s bad, and helping them means doing for them what in a particular moment of their life they aren’t capable of doing.”

— Elena Ferrante

279. “Now that Mario had left me, if he no longer loved me, if I in fact no longer loved him, why should I continue to carry in my flesh so many of his attributes? What I had deposited in him had surely been eliminated now by Carla in the secret years of their relationship. But as for me, if all the features that I had assimilated from him had once seemed to me lovable, how, now that they no longer seemed lovable, was I going to tear them out of me?”

— Elena Ferrante

280. “The reasonableness of others and my own desire for tranquility got on my nerves. The breath built up in my throat, ready to vibrate with words of rage. I felt the need to quarrel, and in fact I quarreled first with our male friends, then with their wives or girlfriends, and finally I went on to clash with anyone, male or female, who tried to help me accept what was happening to my life.”

— Elena Ferrante

281. “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

282. “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

283. “Maybe there’s no second time without a third, but there is a first time without a second.”

— Elena Ferrante

284. “Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.”

— Elena Ferrante

285. “If she had already yielded, if she had already swallowed that insult, her bond with Stefano must truly be strong. She loved him, she loved him like the girls in the photonovels. For her whole life she would sacrifice to him every quality of her own, and he wouldn’t even be aware of the sacrifice, he would be surrounded by the wealth of feeling, intelligence, imagination that were hers, without knowing what to do with them, he would ruin them.”

— Elena Ferrante

286. “I felt squeezed in that vise along with the mass of everyday things and people, and I had a bad taste in my mouth, a permanent sense of nausea that exhausted me, as if everything, thus compacted, and always tighter, were grinding me up, reducing me to a repulsive cream.”

— Elena Ferrante

287. “But a favor has to be answered by another favor, and the courtesies became a chain that imprisoned us.”

— Elena Ferrante

288. “A tangle of resentments, the sense of revenge, the need to test the humiliated power of my body were burning up any residue of good sense.”

— Elena Ferrante

289. “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

290. “She possessed intelligence and didn’t put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the world are merely a sign of vulgarity. That was the fact that must have beguiled Nino: the gratuitousness of Lila’s intelligence.”

— Elena Ferrante

291. “I cried and cried, as if I had carelessly lost somewhere the most promising part of myself.”

— Elena Ferrante

292. “Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.”

— Elena Ferrante

293. “I couldn’t calm down. Was it possible that Mario should leave me like this, without warning? It seemed to me incredible that all of a sudden he had become uninterested in my life, like a plant watered for years that is abruptly allowed to die of drought. I couldn’t conceive that he had unilaterally decided that he no longer owed me any attention.”

— Elena Ferrante

294. “The blood spurted from his neck and hit a copper pot hanging on the wall.”

— Elena Ferrante

295. “The attentions of Pasquale Peluso consoled me greatly, I liked that he made me laugh. Maybe I’m not so ugly, I thought, maybe I can’t see myself.”

— Elena Ferrante

296. “I slept again but only for a few minutes. Then I fell into a torpor crowded with images, in which, without wanting to, I began to tell myself about my mother.”

— Elena Ferrante

297. “She, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn’t afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings.”

— Elena Ferrante

298. “When I gave signs of protest she nearly reminded me of the money she was giving me. She stopped in time, but not so that I didn’t understand: it was like when someone is about to hit you and then doesn’t.”

— Elena Ferrante

299. “As I traveled toward Milan, I discovered that, with Lila set aside, I didn’t know how to give myself substance except by modeling myself on Nino. I was incapable of being a model for myself. Without him I no longer had a nucleus from which to expand outside the neighborhood and through the world, I was a pile of debris.”

— Elena Ferrante

300. “From the first lines I began to feel bad. In Pisa, the bad feeling increased, over days, over months. Every word of Lila’s diminished me. Every sentence, even sentences written when she was still a child, seemed to empty out mine, not the ones of that time but the ones now. And yet every page ignited my thoughts, my ideas, my pages as if until that moment I had lived in a studious but ineffectual stupor.”

— Elena Ferrante