Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Should I restrain this shadow – my mother, all our female ancestors – or should I let her go?”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

354. “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

355. “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

356. “Over time, writing has come to mean giving shape to a permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up.”

— Elena Ferrante

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “Perhaps the idea of money as a cement to solidify our existence and prevent it from dissolving, together with the people who were dear to us, endured. But.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

363. “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

364. “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

365. “La nuova carne viva ripeteva la vecchia per gioco, eravamo una catena di ombre che andava da sempre in scena con la stessa carica di amore, di odio, di voglie e di violenza.”

— Elena Ferrante

366. “I gave a nervous laugh, then said, “Thanks, but at a certain point school is over.” “Not for you: you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.”

— Elena Ferrante

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

377. “I saw her fly toward the asphalt and felt a cruel joy. She seemed to me, as she fell, an ugly creature.”

— Elena Ferrante

378. “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

379. “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

380. “Naples was the great European metropolis where faith in technology, in science, in economic development, in the kindness of nature, in history that leads of necessity to improvement, in democracy, was revealed, most clearly and far in advance, to be completely without foundation.”

— Elena Ferrante

381. “Io – dopo tanta fatica – non so pensare. Nemmeno Mariarosa sa: ha letto pagine e pagine e le ricombina con estro, dando spettacolo. Tutto qui. Lila invece sa. E’ la sua natura. Se avesse studiato, avrebbe saputo pensare a questo modo.”

— Elena Ferrante

382. “What seemed to interest and absorb her most was that all that filth, all that chaos of broken limbs and dug-out eyes and split heads was then covered – literally covered – by a church dedicated to San Giovanni Battista and by a monastery of Augustinian hermits who had a valuable library. Ah, ah – she laughed – underneath there’s blood and above, God, peace, prayer, and books.”

— Elena Ferrante

383. “The depressed don’t write books. People who are happy write, people who travel, are in love, and talk and talk with the conviction that, one way or another, their words always go to the right place.”

— Elena Ferrante

384. “Cand o vedeai, emana o stralucire care parea o palma foarte violenta peste fata saraciei din cartier.”

— Elena Ferrante

385. “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

386. “She was submissive, she gave in immediately out of fear of not being liked, it depressed her that she had given in.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

388. “They had all known one another a long time, they knew they were complicit victims, and they had no doubt about who the whistleblower was: she, the only one who behaved from the start as if the need to work didn’t go hand in hand with the need to be humiliated.”

— Elena Ferrante

389. “Yo me siento como el caballero de una novela antigua que, encerrado en su armadura resplandeciente, tras acometer mil empresas prodigiosas por el mundo, se topa con un pastor harapiento, desnutrido, que sin apartarse nunca del pastizal, con portentoso coraje doblega y domina a horribles bestias con sus propias manos.”

— Elena Ferrante

390. “Cada cual se organiza el recuerdo como le conviene.”

— Elena Ferrante

391. “I concluded by saying that the world urgently needed to be changed, that there were too many tyrants who kept peoples enslaved. But it should be changed by peaceful means.”

— Elena Ferrante

392. “The university doesn’t free women but completes their repression.”

— Elena Ferrante

393. “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

394. “Professor Galiani listened and was impressed by her sincerity, by her unsettling tone, by the intense Italian of her sentences, by her skillfully controlled irony. She must have felt in Lila, I imagine, that elusive quality that seduced and at the same time alarmed, a siren power: it could happen to anyone, it happened to her, and.”

— 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. “I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in this world.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

398. “She claimed that she was in the service of the workers, and yet, from her room in a house full of books and with a view of the sea, she wanted to command you, she wanted to tell you what you should do with your work, she decided for you, she had the solution ready even if you ended up in the street.”

— Elena Ferrante

399. “Maybe,” she said, and I saw that I had hurt her as she had hurt me.”

— Elena Ferrante

400. “Io sono l’otto di spada, io sono la vespa che punge, io sono la serpe scura. lo sono l’animale invulnerabile che attraversa il fuoco e non si brucia.”

— Elena Ferrante