Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “I don’t want anything, I’m made of nothing. I hoped to wake in the morning without desires.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

403. “I don’t want my mother to die worrying about her sons.” “Comfort her.” “How.” She smiled. “With lies. Lies are better than tranquilizers.”

— Elena Ferrante

404. “Zie je, in sprookjes doe je wat je wilt, in de werkelijkheid alleen wat je kunt.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

406. “That made me think that this story would continue forever, recounting now the efforts of children without privileges to improve themselves by getting books from the old shelves, as Lila and I had done as girls, and now the thread of seductive chatter, promises, deceptions, of blood that prevents any true improvement in my city or in the world.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “She knew how to go beyond the limit without ever truly suffering the consequences. In the end people gave in, and were even, however unwillingly, compelled to praise her.”

— Elena Ferrante

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

417. “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

418. “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

419. “En los momentos de crisis, con mucha frecuencia las mujeres tratamos de calmarnos escribiendo.”

— Elena Ferrante

420. “See where that argument with the religion teacher led, every choice has its history, so many moments of our existence are shoved into a corner, waiting for an outlet, and in the end the outlet arrives. But I would have been exaggerating, in reality it was much simpler.”

— Elena Ferrante

421. “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

422. “I perceived immediately that none of those young people were there for the pleasure of being together. Behind the good manners were tensions, enmities, and if they could have they would surely have spent the evening in another way. But.”

— Elena Ferrante

423. “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

424. “Writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned. Writing is getting comfortable with everything that has already been written – great literature and commercial literature, if useful, the novel-essay and the screenplay – and in turn becoming, within the limits of one’s own dizzying, crowded individuality, something written. Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune.”

— Elena Ferrante

425. “In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. When those horrors release a violence that reaches into our cities and our habits we’re startled, we’re alarmed.”

— Elena Ferrante

426. “If she wants Marcello Solara, I will resign myself. I love her so much that if she’s happy with someone else I will withdraw and between us everything will remain as it is now. But if she wants me – if she wants me – there’s no help for it, you must give her to me.”

— Elena Ferrante

427. “Although I imposed on myself an appearance of self-assurance and an iron discipline, I gave in continuously, with painful pleasure, to waves of unhappiness.”

— Elena Ferrante

428. “Un libro, un articolo potevano far rumore, ma il rumore si levava anche dai guerrieri antichi prima della battaglia e se non si accompagnava a una forza reale e a una violenza senza misura era solo teatro.”

— Elena Ferrante

429. “When some handsome youth fell, pierced by a blade beaten on the anvil of death, immediately beggars, bourgeois citizens, kings and queens offered applause that rose to the stars. Ah, the violence: tearing, killing, ripping.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

434. “Then he added, in an almost threatening tone: Without these rasping hands, professor, not a chair would exist, or a building, a car, nothing, not even you; if we workers stopped working everything would stop, the sky would fall to earth and the earth would shoot up the sky, the plants would take over the cities, the Arno would flood your fine houses, and only those who have always worked would know how to survive, and as for you two, you with all your books, the dogs would tear you to pieces.”

— Elena Ferrante

435. “That answer, as Lila’s answers always were, always had been, though intended to be conciliatory, had something arrogant, scornful, about it, which made Pinuccia even angrier.”

— Elena Ferrante

436. “Finally she cried with rage and at the same time maternal pride, “What happened when I conceived you, an accident, a hiccup, a convulsion, the lights went out, a bulb blew, the basin of water fell off the night table? Certainly there must have been something, if you were born so intolerable, so different from the others.”

— Elena Ferrante

437. “Such persistence in memorizing fashionable jargon, wasted effort. I had been conditioned by my education, which had shaped my mind, my voice.”

— Elena Ferrante

438. “My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine, in the words that I’ve uttered, in which there’s often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers, in my less which is such because of her more, in my more which is the yielding to the force of her less.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

440. “I was secretly convinced that I would truly exist only at the moment when my signature, Elena Greco, appeared in print...”

— Elena Ferrante

441. “If people had been horrified at those who wanted to overthrow the state, now they were disgusted by those who, pretending to serve it, had consumed it, like a fat worm in the apple.”

— Elena Ferrante

442. “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

443. “Money gave even more force to the impression that what I lacked she had, and vice versa, in a continuous game of exchanges and reversals that, now happily, now painfully, made us indispensable to each other.”

— Elena Ferrante

444. “So much fuss about the greatness of this one and that one, but what virtue is there in being born with certain qualities, it’s like admiring the bingo basket when you shake it and good numbers come out.”

— Elena Ferrante

445. “Studieren galt als ein Trick der pfiffigsten jungen Leute zur Vermeidung harter Arbeit.”

— Elena Ferrante

446. “But at times, as if a drug had flooder her veins, Lila seemed unable to bear the order she had imposed on herself.”

— Elena Ferrante

447. “But I did think of leaving my husband, I was looking for the right moment. You wait, you get tired, you start waiting again.”

— Elena Ferrante

448. “He turned to Marirosa, as if irritated by the too private note of our exchange: “Elena is asking what there is to do.” Mariarosa answered cheerfully: “The revolution.” So I assumed a mocking tone, I said: “And in your free time?”

— Elena Ferrante

449. “Come soffrivo per lei e per me, come mi vergognavo di essere uscita dalla sua pancia di persona scontenta.”

— Elena Ferrante

450. “She was suggesting that I separate also from my third child. She seemed to be saying: Imma would be better off and so would you. I replied: If Imma leaves me, too, my life will no longer have meaning. But she smiled: Where is it written that lives should have meaning?”

— Elena Ferrante