Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

303. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

311. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

313. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

319. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

323. “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

324. “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

325. “I became anxious if I lost him, I was happy when I saw him return. In other words I loved him and new it and was content to love him.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

335. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

337. “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

338. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

343. “My return to Naples was like having a defective umbrella that suddenly closes over your head in a gust of wind.”

— Elena Ferrante

344. “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

345. “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

346. “I feel ugly, like I’m a bad person, and yet I’d like to be loved.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

348. “I reshuffled the cards that by now we knew well enough. I spoke of the before and the after, of the old generation and of ours, of how we were different, of how she and Stefano were different. And this last argument made a breach, seduced her, I returned to it passionately. She listened to me in silence, evidently she wanted to be helped to compose herself, and slowly she did.”

— Elena Ferrante

349. “Ahead of us were many hours when no one in our families would look for us. When I think of the pleasure of being free, I think of the start of that day, of coming out of the tunnel and finding ourselves on a road that went straight as far as the eye could see, the road that, according to what Rino had told Lila, if you got to the end arrived at the sea. I felt joyfully open to the unknown.”

— Elena Ferrante

350. “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