Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

357. “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

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. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

366. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

377. “They were pretending to be a mother and father with their baby, but it wasn’t peaceful: they were pretending to have a fight. I stopped. Dede instructed Mirko: You have to hit me, understand? 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

378. “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

379. “La culpa no la tienen quienes se rebelan, la culpa la tienen quienes no saben gobernar.”

— Elena Ferrante

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “I’ve known how to whistle since I was five years old.”

— Elena Ferrante

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

396. “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

397. “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

398. “At those moments I took it for granted that there was not and never would be a manuscript of Lila’s. I had always overestimated her, nothing memorable would emerge from her – something that reassured me and yet truly upset me. I loved Lila. I wanted her to last. But I wanted it to be I who made her last. I thought it was my task. I was convinced that she herself, as a girl, had assigned it to me.”

— Elena Ferrante

399. “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

400. “L’infanzia e’ una fabbrica di menzogne che durano all’imperfetto: la mia almeno era stata cosi.”

— Elena Ferrante