Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “Soon she’ll start yelling, I thought, soon she’ll hit her, trying to break that bond. Instead, the bond will become more twisted, will strengthen in remorse, in the humiliation of having shown herself in public to be an unaffectionate mother, not the mother of church or the Sunday supplements.”

— Elena Ferrante

404. “Volevo scrivere storie piene di spifferi.”

— Elena Ferrante

405. “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

406. “How and when words escape from books and the books end up seeming like empty graves is something to think about.”

— Elena Ferrante

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

412. “She became transparent skin over bones, her eyes drowning in violet wells, her hands damp spider webs.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

414. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

416. “And yet now that we were seventeen the substance of time itself no longer seemed fluid but had assumed a gluelike consistency and churned around us like a yellow cream in a confectioner’s machine.”

— Elena Ferrante

417. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

419. “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

420. “My job, I thought, is to demonstrate that one can remain healthy. Demonstrate it to myself, no one else. If I am exposed to lizards, I will fight the lizards. If I am exposed to ants, I will fight the ants. If I am exposed to thieves, I will fight the thieves. If I am exposed to myself, I will fight myself.”

— Elena Ferrante

421. “Ognuno si organizza la memoria come gli conviene.”

— Elena Ferrante

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “I thought: not even Lila, in spite of everything, has managed to escape from my mother’s world.”

— Elena Ferrante

427. “But at the same time I was grateful for the small dose of humiliation and pain he had inflicted on me. I went around the bed, sat on the edge beside him, and masturbated him. He let me do it, with his eyes closed. He ejaculated without a moan, as if he were feeling no pleasure.”

— Elena Ferrante

428. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

430. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

433. “Maybe it’s not all over: even after she’s married, something between us will endure.”

— Elena Ferrante

434. “Roberto the whole time with an attitude.”

— 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. “I had less success in the courtyard. There only love and boyfriends counted.”

— Elena Ferrante

438. “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

439. “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

440. “I liked to discover connections like that, especially if they concerned Lila. I traced lines between moments and events distant from one another, I established convergences and divergences.”

— Elena Ferrante

441. “Yet here she was insisting that I stay with her, to keep me from who knows what stormy sea, from who knows what abyss or precipice, all dangers that at that moment were represented in her eyes by Antonio. But staying near her meant staying in her world, becoming completely like her. And if I became like her, who would be right for me if not Antonio?”

— Elena Ferrante

442. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

444. “Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

447. “Then I felt as if my thoughts were cut off in the middle, absorbing and yet defective, with an urgent need for verification, for development, yet without conviction, without faith in themselves.”

— Elena Ferrante

448. “Really, go ahead.” “No.”

— Elena Ferrante

449. “Yes, Imma was consoled but only because Lila was introducing her to a permanent stream of splendors and miseries, a cyclical Naples where everything was marvelous and everything became gray and irrational and everything sparkled again, as when a cloud passes over the sun and the sun appears to flee, a timid, pale disk, near extinction, but not look, once the cloud dissolves it’s suddenly dazzling again, so bright you have to shield your eyes with your hand.”

— Elena Ferrante

450. “Both Pasquale and Rino turned out to be surprisingly good dancers, and we learned from them the tango, the waltz, the polka, and the mazurka.”

— Elena Ferrante