Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

254. “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

255. “Vuoi bene tutta la vita a persone che non sai mai veramente chi sono.”

— Elena Ferrante

256. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew now to be not only a man in the right way, but also a woman.”

— Elena Ferrante

269. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

274. “I didn’t intend to say something unkind. I meant only that you are good at making yourself liked. The difference between you and me, always, has been that people are afraid of me and not of you.”

— Elena Ferrante

275. “Eine Gemeinschaft, die es normal findet, so viel weibliche Intelligenz mit der Sorge um Kinder und Haushalt zu ersticken, schadet sich selbst und merkt es nicht mal.”

— Elena Ferrante

276. “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

277. “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

278. “People died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse, and yet, in every round of voting, gave their enthusiastic approval to the politicians who made their life unbearable.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “The ‘right reading’ is an invention of academics and critics. Every reader gets from the book he is reading nothing else but his book. The shelves where we line up the volumes we’ve read are deceptive. We have available there only titles, covers, pages. But the books we’ve truly read are phantoms conjured up by reading with no rules.”

— Elena Ferrante

284. “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

285. “Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly.”

— Elena Ferrante

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

290. “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

291. “Lies are better than tranquilizers.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

293. “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

294. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

296. “Experimentei algo que depois, ao longo de minha vida, se repetiu frequentemente: a alegria do novo.”

— Elena Ferrante

297. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

299. “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

300. “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