Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “We gazed at the constellations, praising the portentous architecture of the sky with trite formulas.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

354. “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

355. “Maybe I should tell her that things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. It’s a good sentence, she’ll like it.”

— Elena Ferrante

356. “I had been a girl who felt lost, this was true. All the hopes of youth seemed to have been destroyed, I seemed to be falling backwards towards my mother, my grandmother, the chain of mute or angry women I came from. Missed opportunities.”

— Elena Ferrante

357. “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

358. “Segno che forse Lila aveva ragione: la gente di quella risma bisognava combatterla conquistandosi una vita superiore, di quelle che loro non potevano nemmeno immaginare.”

— Elena Ferrante

359. “No, words rarely go to the right place, and if they do, it’s only for a very brief time. Otherwise they’re useful for speaking nonsense, as now. Or for pretending that everything is under control.” “Pretending? You who have always kept everything under control, you were pretending?” “Why not? It’s unavoidable to pretend a little.”

— Elena Ferrante

360. “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

361. “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

362. “I would have done anything for her, on that morning of reconciliation: run away from home, leave the neighborhood, sleep in farmhouses, feed on roots, descend into the sewers through the grates, never turn back, not even if it was cold, not even if it rained.”

— Elena Ferrante

363. “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

364. “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

365. “Ich bin, was ich bin, und ich kann nichts anderes tun als mich akzeptieren; ich bin so geboren, in dieser Stadt, mit diesem Dialekt, ohne Geld; ich werde geben, was ich geben kann, werde mir nehmen, was ich nehmen kann, werde ertragen, was ertragen werden muss.”

— Elena Ferrante

366. “And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.”

— Elena Ferrante

367. “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

368. “Aunt Lina said that spirits existed, but not in the places, or in the alleys, or near the ancient gates of the Vatso. They existed in people’s ears, in the eyes when eyes looked inside and not out, in the voice as soon as it begins to speak, in the head when it thinks, because words are full of ghosts but so are images. Is it true, Mamma?”

— Elena Ferrante

369. “Right after her funeral I felt the way you feel when it suddenly starts raining hard, and you look around and find no place to take shelter.”

— Elena Ferrante

370. “Se non c’e’ amore, non solo inaridisce la vita delle persone, ma anche quella delle citta.”

— Elena Ferrante

371. “Mia madre vedeva sempre il male dove con mio grande fastidio si scopriva presto o tardi che il male c’era davvero, e il suo occhio strabico pareva fatto apposta per individuare i movimenti segreti del rione.”

— Elena Ferrante

372. “As a result of subduing the forces of nature with the tools that we invent, we find ourselves today at the point where the force of our tools has become a greater concern than the forces of nature.”

— Elena Ferrante

373. “We have to work with consistency, with discipline, step by step, no matter how things are going around us, and be careful not to make a mistake, because we pay for our mistakes.”

— Elena Ferrante

374. “There is a poverty that makes us all cruel.”

— Elena Ferrante

375. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

377. “Everyone knew Enzo. He was a repeater and at least a couple of times had been dragged through the classrooms with a card around his neck on which Maestro Ferraro, a tall, very thin man, with very short gray hair, a small, lined face, and worried eyes, had written “Dunce.” Nino on the other hand was so good, so meek, so quiet that he was well known and liked, especially by me. Naturally Enzo hardly counted, scholastically speaking, we kept an eye on him only because he was aggressive.”

— Elena Ferrante

378. “Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly. And characters? I feel they are false when they exhibit clear coherence and I become passionate about them when they say one thing and do another.”

— Elena Ferrante

379. “But in a confused way I felt that if I ran away with the others I would leave with her something of mine that she would never give back.”

— Elena Ferrante

380. “Se non c’e’ amore, non solo inaridisce la vita delle persone, ma anche quella delle citta’ “. Non mi ricordo come si espresse di preciso, ma il concetto era quello, e io lo associai alle nostre strade sporche, ai giardinetti polverosi, alla campagna scempiata dai palazzi nuovi, alla violenza in ogni casa, in ogni famiglia.”

— Elena Ferrante

381. “May I point out something? You always use true and truthfully, when you speak and when you write. Or you say: unexpectedly. But when do people ever speak truthfully and when do things ever happen unexpectedly? You know better than I that it’s all a fraud and that one thing follows another and then another. I don’t do anything truthfully anymore, Lenu. And I’ve learned to pay attention to things. Only idiots believe that they happen unexpectedly.”

— Elena Ferrante

382. “Reality can’t stay inside the elegant moulds of art; it always spills over, indecorously.”

— Elena Ferrante

383. “Lila’s world, as usual, rapidly superimposed itself on mine. Everything that I had written in July and August seemed to me trivial, I was seized by a frenzy to redeem myself.”

— Elena Ferrante

384. “At the time I also considered myself a lowly, abject woman. I was afraid, as I said, that it was precisely my female nature that kept me from bringing the pen as close as possible to the pain I wanted to express. For a woman who has something to say, does it really tkae a miracle – I said to myself – to dissolve the margins within which nature has enclosed her and shower herself in her own words to the world?”

— Elena Ferrante

385. “I am therefore Italian, completely and with pride. But if I could, I would descend into all languages and let myself be permeated by them all. Even the terrible Google Translate consoles me. We can be much more than what we happen to be.”

— Elena Ferrante

386. “There was something malevolent in the inequality, and now I knew it. It acted in the depths, it dug deeper than money.”

— Elena Ferrante

387. “Eve can’t, doesn’t know how, doesn’t have the material to be Eve outside of Adam. Her evil and her good are evil and good according to Adam. Eve is Adam as a woman. And the divine work was so successful that she herself, in herself, doesn’t know what she is, she has pliable features, she doesn’t possess her own language, she doesn’t have a spirit or logic of her own, she loses her shape easily.”

— Elena Ferrante

388. “Hay situaciones en que las elecciones te vienen impuestas.”

— Elena Ferrante

389. “Don’t get angry, she said, try to reflect: what does a woman of your understanding feel at the idea that her happiness becomes the ruin of someone else?”

— Elena Ferrante

390. “I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn’t it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?”

— Elena Ferrante

391. “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

392. “To cause pain was a disease. As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs.”

— Elena Ferrante

393. “Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don’t want to think about the rest. Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow.”

— Elena Ferrante

394. “I there first felt the impact of time, the force that was pushing me toward forty, the velocity with which life was consumed, the concreteness of the exposure to death: If it’s happening to her, I thought, there’s no escape, it will happen to me as well.”

— Elena Ferrante

395. “A male, apart from the mad moments when you love him and he enters you, always remains outside. So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him. He liked me, I liked him, the end.”

— Elena Ferrante

396. “Esigeva che svilissi gli amanti recenti dimostrandogli che il mio unico desiderio era tornare a essere penetrata da lui. Voleva insomma riaffermare il suo primato, poi di sicuro sarebbe di nuovo sparito.”

— Elena Ferrante

397. “Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me.”

— Elena Ferrante

398. “In conversations with my daughters I hear omitted words or phrases. Sometimes they get mad, they say Mama, I never said that, you’re saying it, you invented it. But I invent nothing; you just have to listen – the unspoken says more than the spoken.”

— Elena Ferrante

399. “I’m dead, but I’m fine.”

— Elena Ferrante

400. “She talked to the child and her doll in the pleasing cadence of the Neapolitan dialect that I love, the tender language of playfulness and sweet nothings. I was enchanted. Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote. I remember the dialect on my mother’s lips when she lost that gentle cadence and yelled at us, poisoned by her unhappiness: I can’t take you anymore, I can’t take any more.”

— Elena Ferrante