Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “Tutto insomma tremolava, si inarcava come per cambiare i connotati, non farsi riconoscere negli odi accumulati, nelle tensioni, nelle brutture, e mostrare invece una faccia nuova.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

322. “Ma non riuscivo a cancellare le frasi, mi sentivo in mente la loro sintassi bell’e pronta e ne ero spaventata, ne ero affascinata, mi faceva orrore, mi seduceva.”

— Elena Ferrante

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

326. “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

327. “Disacculturate, starting with maternity, don’t give children to anyone. Get rid of the master-slave dialectic. Rip inferiority from our brains. Restore women to themselves. Don’t create antitheses. Move on another plane in the name of one’s own difference. The university doesn’t free women but completes their repression.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

332. “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

333. “Para escribir hay que desear que algo te sobreviva.”

— Elena Ferrante

334. “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

335. “Para los hijos los padres siempre somos molestos.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

338. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

340. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

344. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

346. “For children parents are always a burden. But parents who draw too much attention to themselves are intolerable.”

— Elena Ferrante

347. “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

348. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

350. “Ognuno si organizza la memoria come gli conviene.”

— Elena Ferrante