Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “The “Genuine ‘real life,‘” as Dostoevsky called it, is an obsession, a torment for the writer. With greater or less ability we fabricate fictions not so that the false will seem true but to tell the most unspeakable truth with absolute faithfulness through the fiction.”

— Elena Ferrante

302. “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

303. “You can’t leave me here to hope, when in reality you’ve already decided everything.”

— Elena Ferrante

304. “Why would anyone be interested in my little personal story if we can do without Homer’s or Shakespeare’s? Someone who truly loves literature is like a person of faith. The believer knows very well that there is nothing at all at the bureau of vital statistics about the Jesus that truly counts for him.”

— Elena Ferrante

305. “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

306. “I mean that a party can’t be anything other than a distributor of favors in exchange for support, ideals are part of the furniture.”

— Elena Ferrante

307. “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

308. “We walked for a long time. We kissed, we embraced on the Lungarno, I asked him, half serious, half joking, if he wanted to sneak into my room. He shook his head, he went back to kissing me passionately. There were entire libraries separating him and Antonio, but they were similar.”

— Elena Ferrante

309. “Stop it, who cares about this Dostoyevsky, who gives a damn about the Karamazovs.”

— Elena Ferrante

310. “Her nausea increased, the dialect had become unfamiliar, the way our wet throats bathed the words in the liquid of saliva was intolerable. A sense of repulsion had invested all the bodies in movement, their bone structure, the frenzy that shook them. How poorly made we are, she thought, how insufficient. The broad shoulders, the arms, the legs, the ears, noses, eyes, seemed to her attributes of monstrous beings who had fallen from some corner of the black sky.”

— Elena Ferrante

311. “That was really fun,” Pina exclaimed, but with the air of one who wants to say: You two bitches, you sent me off by myself with someone I don’t even know.”

— Elena Ferrante

312. “We were supposed to go to the sea and we hadn’t gone, I had been punished for nothing. A mysterious inversion of attitudes had occurred: I, despite the rain, would have continued on the road, I felt far from everything and everyone, and distance – I discovered for the first time – extinguished in me every tie and every worry; Lila had abruptly repented of her own plan, she had given up the sea, she had wanted to return to the confines of the neighborhood. I couldn’t figure it out.”

— Elena Ferrante

313. “A book should push the reader to confront himself and the world.”

— Elena Ferrante

314. “I didn’t hear what he said, but I felt like laughing at his artificial imperiousness. The laugh took away every desire to attack, drained me... React. I began to tidy up. When I had finished I began again, a kind of roundup of everything that didn’t appear to be in order. Lucidity, determination, hold on to life.”

— Elena Ferrante

315. “It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.”

— Elena Ferrante

316. “For example, I came to my exams very well prepared, but if the professor were suddenly to ask me, “Do you know from what works I derive the authority on the basis of which I teach this subject in this university?” I wouldn’t know what to answer. But the others knew. So I moved among them fearful of saying and doing the wrong things.”

— Elena Ferrante

317. “If you don’t, you’re guilty not only on a human level but also on a political one.” “What’s the crime?” “The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I waited in silence.”

— Elena Ferrante

318. “Do men learn from women? Often. Do they admit it publicly? Rarely, even today.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

320. “If she kept him next to her she was afraid of breaking him, if she pushed him too far away she was afraid of losing him.”

— Elena Ferrante

321. “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

322. “I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new.”

— Elena Ferrante

323. “He said we lived in a provincial country, where every occasion was an opportunity for complaining, but meanwhile no one rolled up his sleeves and reorganized things, trying to make them function.”

— Elena Ferrante

324. “So pleasure was this: breaking, mixing, no longer knowing what was mine and what was his.”

— Elena Ferrante

325. “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

326. “There are moments when what exists on the edges of our lives, and which, it seems, will be in the background forever – an empire, a political party, a faith, a monument, but also simply the people who are part of our daily existence – collapses in an utterly unexpected way, and right when countless other things are pressing upon us.”

— Elena Ferrante

327. “That connection between anxiety and ugliness unexpectedly consoled me. You can turn ugly because of worries –.”

— Elena Ferrante

328. “To carry out any project to which you attach your own name you have to love yourself.”

— Elena Ferrante

329. “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

330. “As for the minor characters, it seemed natural for each of them to have his good or bad moment in the life of the protagonists and then slip into the background, just as when we think back on our existence and, of the many people who entered the flow of our lives, remember almost nothing.”

— Elena Ferrante

331. “Lila always knew what she wanted and got it; I don’t want anything, I’m made of nothing. I hoped to wake in the morning without desires. Once I was emptied – I imagined – the affection of Antonio, my affection for him will be enough.”

— Elena Ferrante

332. “I behaved like that certainly to feel free from all the old bonds, to make it clear that I didn’t care anymore about the judgment of relatives and friends, their values, their wanting me to be consistent with what they imagined themselves to be.”

— Elena Ferrante

333. “They’re scared. They’re afraid we won’t be worthy of them.”

— Elena Ferrante

334. “The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.”

— Elena Ferrante

335. “Palabras, con ellas se hace y se deshace a voluntad.”

— Elena Ferrante

336. “For your whole life you love people and you never really know who they are.”

— Elena Ferrante

337. “Scriveva, nelle ultime pagine, di sentirsi intorno tutto il male del rione. Anzi, buttava li oscuramente: male e bene sono mescolati e si rinforzano a vicenda. Marcello, a rifletterci, era veramente una buona sistemazione, ma il buono sapeva di cattivo e il cattivo sapeva di buono, un’amalgama che le toglieva il fiato.”

— Elena Ferrante

338. “We gazed at the constellations, praising the portentous architecture of the sky with trite formulas.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

340. “How difficult it is to find one’s way, how difficult it is not to violate any of the incredibly detailed male regulations.”

— Elena Ferrante

341. “Especially at night she was afraid of waking up and finding him formless in the bed, transformed into excrescences that burst out because of too much fluid, the flesh melted and dripping, and with it everything around, the furniture, the entire apartment and she herself, his wife, broken, sucked into that stream polluted by living matter.”

— Elena Ferrante

342. “Should I restrain this shadow – my mother, all our female ancestors – or should I let her go?”

— Elena Ferrante

343. “I realized she wanted many things at the same time, and that kept her in a permanent state of dissatisfaction.”

— Elena Ferrante

344. “In a short while I wished I could talk every day to a boy on that level: how many mistakes I had made with him; what foolishness it had been to want him, love him, and yet always avoid him.”

— Elena Ferrante

345. “How many things pass through time randomly detached from the bodies and voices of persons. My mother knew the art of making clothes last forever.”

— Elena Ferrante

346. “It occurred to me that it was now a linguistic question. She resorted to Italian as if to a barrier; I tried to push her toward dialect, our language of candor. But while her Italian was translated from dialect, my dialect was increasingly translated from Italian, and we both spoke a false language. She needed to explode, lose control of the words.”

— Elena Ferrante

347. “I’m not wise, but I read a lot of novels.”

— Elena Ferrante

348. “As usual it seemed to her that she could enter and leave my life without any worries, as if we were still a single thing and there was no need to ask how are you, how are things, am I disturbing you.”

— Elena Ferrante

349. “Would she always do the things I was supposed to do, before and better than me? She eluded me when I followed her and meanwhile stayed close on my heels in order to pass me by?”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante