Top 500 Elena Ferrante Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

404. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

406. “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

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

— 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. “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

410. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

412. “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

413. “I there first felt the impact of time, the force that was pushing me toward forty, the velocity with which life was consumed, the concreteness of the exposure to death: If it’s happening to her, I thought, there’s no escape, it will happen to me as well.”

— Elena Ferrante

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

417. “You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn’t happen to the women important to them and that – this was the idea they had grown up with – they had to protect her.”

— Elena Ferrante

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

422. “I’m dead, but I’m fine.”

— Elena Ferrante

423. “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

424. “Blijft het feit dat ik mijn hand opstak en zei dat het menselijke lot zo duidelijk aan de blinde razernij van het toeval was blootgesteld dat jezelf aan een God toevertrouwen hetzelfde was als plaatjes verzamelen terwijl de stad brandt in het hellevuur.”

— Elena Ferrante

425. “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

426. “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

427. “Hay situaciones en que las elecciones te vienen impuestas.”

— Elena Ferrante

428. “She felt alone, she was secretly waiting for a father who wasn’t showing up, she could no longer hold the confusion of that day within the limits of a game.”

— Elena Ferrante

429. “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

430. “Lila’s world, as usual, rapidly superimposed itself on mine. Everything that I had written in July and August seemed to me trivial, I was seized by a frenzy to redeem myself.”

— Elena Ferrante

431. “Life without seeing and without speaking, without speaking and listening, life without a covering, with a container is shapeless.”

— Elena Ferrante

432. “It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of on required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing.”

— Elena Ferrante

433. “Volevo scrivere storie piene di spifferi.”

— Elena Ferrante

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

437. “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

438. “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

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

— Elena Ferrante

440. “The odor was of lunchtime or dinnertime, when, coming from every doorway, the smells of the various dishes mingle in the stairwell but are ruined by a stink of mold and cobwebs.”

— Elena Ferrante

441. “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

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. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “As a girl I had liked obscene language, it gave me a sense of masculine freedom. Now I knew that obscenity could raise sparks of madness if it came from a mouth as controlled as mine. So I closed my eyes, I held my hands and squeezed my eyelids.”

— Elena Ferrante

448. “Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly. And characters? I feel they are false when they exhibit clear coherence and I become passionate about them when they say one thing and do another.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

450. “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