Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

404. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

406. “I’m dead, but I’m fine.”

— Elena Ferrante

407. “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

408. “I don’t want anything, I’m made of nothing. I hoped to wake in the morning without desires.”

— Elena Ferrante

409. “I discovered everywhere female automations created by men. There was nothing of ourselves, and the little there was that rose up in protest immediately became material for their manufacturing.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

421. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “Il giorno seguente partii per Venezia insieme a Ida. In treno ci ripromettemmo di diventare adulte come a nessuna era mai successo.”

— Elena Ferrante

427. “I hope that in the free time of old age, the wonder will return.”

— Elena Ferrante

428. “It seemed, rather, a way, like many, to convince oneself that there is always a slender branch of one’s life to hang on to, and, by being suspended there, get used to the inevitability of falling.”

— Elena Ferrante

429. “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

430. “But above all I no longer wanted to know if it was strychnine or something else that had killed Otto. The dog had fallen through a hole in the net of events. We leave so many of them, lacerations of negligence, when we put together cause and effect. The essential thing was that the string, the weave that now supported me, should hold. 43.”

— Elena Ferrante

431. “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

432. “Stefano seemed to seek in her the most palpable symbol of the future of wealth and power that he intended; and she seemed to use the seal that he was placing on her to make herself, her brother, her parents, her other relatives safe from all that she had confusedly confronted and challenges since she was a child.”

— Elena Ferrante

433. “In the end she read it. It seemed to me that she shrank, as if I had unloaded a weight on her. And I had the impression that she was making a painful effort to free from some corner of herself the old Lila, the one who read, wrote, drew, made plans spontaneously – the naturalness of an instinctive reaction. When she succeeded, everything seemed pleasantly light.”

— Elena Ferrante

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

442. “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

443. “La lontananza mi distingueva dentro ogni legame e ogni preoccupazione.”

— Elena Ferrante

444. “Translators transport nations into other nations. They are the first to reckon with distant modes of feeling. Even their mistakes are evidence of a positive force. Translation is our salvation. It draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.”

— Elena Ferrante

445. “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

446. “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

447. “Maybe I’m not so ugly, I thought, maybe I can’t see myself.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

449. “I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story yet in fact are nothing, nothing of mine, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion, only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even she who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.”

— Elena Ferrante

450. “We are flying over a ball of fire.”

— Elena Ferrante