Elena Ferrante Quotes & Sayings

My work stops at publication. If the books don't contain in themselves their reasons for being - questions and answers - it means I was wrong to have them published. — Elena Ferrante

The title is Ulysses'
'Is it about the Odyssey?'
'No, it's about how prosaic life is today.'
'And so?'
'That's all. It says that our heads are full of nonsense. That we are flesh, blood, and bone. That one person has the same value as another. That we want only to eat, drink, fuck. — Elena Ferrante

Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing. — Elena Ferrante

In the crush men used the women to play silent games with themselves. One stared ironically at a dark-haired girl to see if she would lower her gaze. One, with his eyes, caught a bit of lace between two buttons of a blouse, or harpooned a strap. Others passed the time looking out the window into cars for a glimpse of an uncovered leg, the play of muscles as a foot pushed break or clutch, a hand absentmindedly scratching the inside of a thigh. — Elena Ferrante

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, everything is this, now: — Elena Ferrante

I doubt that work ennobles man and I am absolutely certain that it does not ennoble woman. — Elena Ferrante

I became disenchanted. My first impression, that of finding myself part of a fearless battle, passed. The trepidation at every exam and the joy of passing it with the highest marks had faded. Gone was the pleasure of re-educating my voice, my gestures, my way of dressing and walking, as if I were competing for the prize of best disguise, the mask worn so well that it was almost a face. — Elena Ferrante

Engineering -nature is engineering, so is culture, science is right behind, only chaos is not an engineer- and, along with it, the furious need to reproduce. — Elena Ferrante

There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors. — Elena Ferrante

I don't want to accept an idea of life where the success of the self is measured by the success of the written page. — Elena Ferrante

I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet of my mind. I can't stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, break. — Elena Ferrante

Yes, yes, resign yourself to what you are, each on his own path. — Elena Ferrante

Maybe there's no second time without a third, but there is a first time without a second. — Elena Ferrante

Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite. And there was nothing in her appearance that acted as a corrective. — Elena Ferrante

..what a terrible thing a dissatisfied mind is. — Elena Ferrante

The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere. — Elena Ferrante

The laws work for those who fear them, not for those who violate them. — Elena Ferrante

In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters. — Elena Ferrante

Answered slowly: I don't know, I don't want to know. And then I admitted that there had been a kind of admiration for her body, maybe that, yes, but I ruled out anything ever happening between us. Too much fear, if we had been seen we would have been beaten to death. — Elena Ferrante

Mario, I wrote, to give myself courage, had not taken away the world, he had taken away only himself. And you are not a woman of thirty years ago. You are of today, take hold of today, don't regress, don't lose yourself, keep a tight grip. Above all, don't give into distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. He's gone, you're still here. You'll no longer enjoy the gleam of his eyes, of his words, but so what? Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness, don't let yourself break like an ornament, you're not a knickknack, no woman is a knickknack. La femme rompue, ah, rompue, the destroyed woman, destroyed, shit. 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

We told each other everything, even the little things, and were happy. — Elena Ferrante

They were complicated years. The order of the world in which we had grown up was dissolving. The old skills resulting from long study and knowledge of the correct political line suddenly seemed senseless. Anarchist, Marxist, Gramscian, Communist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, worker were quickly becoming obsolete labels or, worse, a mark of brutality. The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere. Meanwhile, by means legal and illegal, all the accounts that remained open in the state and in the revolutionary organizations were being closed with a heavy hand. One might easily end up murdered or in jail, and among the common people a stampede had begun. — Elena Ferrante

Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause, there are the likable ones and the unlikable, the good and the bad, everything in the end consoles you. — Elena Ferrante

Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind. — Elena Ferrante

Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor, even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain. — Elena Ferrante

Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence. — Elena Ferrante

Finally he had decided that he had to free Lila, even if at that moment, perhaps, she had no desire to be freed. But - he had said to himself - it takes time for people to understand what's good and what's bad, and helping them means doing for them what in a particular moment of their life they aren't capable of doing. — Elena Ferrante

What I expect from a good story is that it will tell me today what I can't know from any other source but that story, from its unique way of putting something into words, from the feeling that it implies. — Elena Ferrante

Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write. — Elena Ferrante

Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others. — Elena Ferrante

I felt that there was no irony, it was a real compliment. Then she added with sudden harshness: "I don't want to read anything else that you write." "Why?" She thought about it. "Because it hurts me," and she struck her forehead with her hand and burst out laughing. — Elena Ferrante

In hyperbolic tones he listed the catastrophes that in his view were approaching: one, the decline of the revolutionary subject par excellence, the working class; two, the definitive dispersion of the political patrimony of socialists and Communists, who were already perverted by their daily quarrel over which was playing the role of capital's crutch; three, the end of every hypothesis of change, what was there was there and we would have to adapt to it. — Elena Ferrante

Maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved. — Elena Ferrante

The world had retreated. I felt sunk inside myself, inside my flesh, which seemed to me not only the sole dwelling possible but also the only material for which it was worthwhile to struggle. It — Elena Ferrante

Lila shook her head skeptically. She was trying to understand, we were both trying to understand, and understanding was something that we loved to do. — Elena Ferrante

I had less success in the courtyard. There only love and boyfriends counted. — Elena Ferrante

She deserved him because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not to hope that he would want her. — Elena Ferrante

Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories ... The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would. — Elena Ferrante

I let his rose wither in a vase on my desk, a vase painfully empty of flowers since the long-ago time when, on my birthday, Mario would give me a cattleya, in imitation of Swann. In the evening the flower was already black and bent on its stem. I threw it in the trash. — Elena Ferrante

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

Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. — Elena Ferrante

...a woman without love for her origins is lost. — Elena Ferrante

Maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, — Elena Ferrante

In order not to cut out a large part of one's private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing. — Elena Ferrante

Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it. — Elena Ferrante

I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness. — Elena Ferrante

That the human condition was so obviously exposed to the blind fury of chance that to trust in a God, a Jesus, the Holy Spirit - this last a completely superfluous entity, it was there only to make up a trinity, notoriously nobler than the mere binomial father-son - was the same thing as collecting trading cards while the city burns in the fires of hell. — Elena Ferrante

There are people who leave and people who know how to be left. — Elena Ferrante

Nowhere is it written that you can't do it. — Elena Ferrante

In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. — Elena Ferrante

Soon, however, it wasn't a matter of ioco or practice. In that place where they threw out beasts and garbage a lot of human blood was shed. It seems that the game of throwing the prete was invented there, the stone — Elena Ferrante

Earthquake - the earthquake of November 23, 1980, with its infinite destruction - entered into our bones. It expelled the habit of stability and solidity, the confidence that every second would be identical to the next, the familiarity of — Elena Ferrante

I listened, I understood and I didn't understand. Long ago she had threatened Marcello with the shoemaker's knife simply because he had dared to grab my wrist and break the bracelet. From that point on, I was sure that if Marcello had just brushed against her she would have killed him. But toward Stefano, now, she showed no explicit aggression. Of course, the explanation was simple: we had seen our fathers beat our mothers from childhood. We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us. As — Elena Ferrante

Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity. — Elena Ferrante

The dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death. — Elena Ferrante

Religion will disappear from men's consciousness when, finally, we have constructed a world of equals, without class distinctions, and with a sound of scientific conception of society and of life — Elena Ferrante

Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense — Elena Ferrante

Individuals and cities without love are a danger to themselves and to others. — Elena Ferrante

Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night. — Elena Ferrante

I'm laughing, I apologized, at the situation, at you, who've wanted to kill Nino forever, and at me, who if he showed up now would say to you: Yes, kill him. I'm laughing out of despair, because I've never been so offended, because I feel humiliated in a way that I don't know if you can imagine, because at this moment I'm so ill that I think I'm fainting. — Elena Ferrante

I'm lying, yes, but why do you force me to give a linear explanation; linear explanations are almost always lies. — Elena Ferrante

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. — Elena Ferrante

Accept that to be adult is to disappear, is to learn to hide to the point of vanishing? — Elena Ferrante

The daily standard of unlivability isn't news. So when the exceptional passes, everything is silent and everything continues to rot. — Elena Ferrante

Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn't agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life. — Elena Ferrante

A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women's intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn't realize it. I — Elena Ferrante

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

What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn't live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him. — Elena Ferrante

When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities. — Elena Ferrante

Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me...I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition. — Elena Ferrante

Lies are better than tranquilizers. — Elena Ferrante

How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they're at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function. To say : I am your history, you begin from me, listen to me, it could be useful to you. — Elena Ferrante

My breasts are small," I said in a whisper, but immediately despised myself because it sounded as if I were making excuses, excuse me if I can't offer you big tits, I hope you enjoy yourself anyway, idiot that I was, if he liked little tits, good; if not, the worse for him, it was all free, a stroke of luck had fallen to this shit, the best birthday present he could hope for, at his age. — Elena Ferrante

I pay attention to every system of conventions and expectations, above all literary conventions and the expectations they generate in readers. But that law-abiding side of me, sooner or later, has to face my disobedient side. And, in the end, the latter always wins. — Elena Ferrante

But her husband was sleeping, he had fallen asleep as if wrapped in a magic cape. — Elena Ferrante

It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute. — Elena Ferrante

The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women's intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn't realize it. I waited in silence — Elena Ferrante

No, to produce ideas you don't have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival. — Elena Ferrante

Perhaps Lila was right: my book - even though it was having so much success - really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn't been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things. — Elena Ferrante

I felt that fear in me could not put down roots, and even the lava, the fiery stream of melting matter settled in my mind in orderly sentences, a pavement of black stones like the streets of Naples, where I was always and no matter what at the center. Everything that struck me
my studies, books, Franco, Pietro, the children, Nino, the earthquake
would pass, and I, whatever I among those I was accumulating, I would remain firm. 179 — Elena Ferrante

He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living. — Elena Ferrante

That year it seemed to me that I expanded like pizza dough. — Elena Ferrante

I knew - perhaps I hoped - that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again. — Elena Ferrante

Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. — Elena Ferrante

I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us. — Elena Ferrante

So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him. — Elena Ferrante

One can't go on anymore, she said, electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave traces of yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes. — Elena Ferrante

She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, 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

There are moments when we resort to senseless formulations and advance absurd claims to hide straightforward feelings. — Elena Ferrante

What a waste it would be, I said to myself, to ruin our story by leaving too much space for ill feelings: ill feelings are inevitable, but the essential thing is to keep them in check. — Elena Ferrante

To carry out any project to which you attach your own name you have to love yourself. — Elena Ferrante

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell. — Elena Ferrante

I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages. — Elena Ferrante

We walked for a long time. We kissed, we embraced on the Lungarno, I asked him, half serious, half joking, if he wanted to sneak into my room. He shook his head, he went back to kissing me passionately. There were entire libraries separating him and Antonio, but they were similar. — Elena Ferrante

I don't have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring. — Elena Ferrante

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

She was like the full moon when it crouches behind the forest and the branches scribble on its face. — Elena Ferrante

Antonio's fixation was always the same: Sarratore's son {Nino}. He was afraid that I would talk to him, even that I would see him {at school}. Naturally, to prevent him from suffering, I concealed the fact that I ran into Nino entering school, coming out, in the corridors. Nothing particularly happened, at most we exchanged a nod of greeting and went on our way: I could have talked to my boyfriend about it without any problems if he had been a reasonable person. But Antonio was not reasonable and in truth I wasn't either. Although Nino gave me no encouragement, a mere glimpse of him left me distracted during class. His presence a few classrooms away - real, alive, better educated than the professors, and courageous, and disobedient - drained meaning from the teachers' lectures, the pages of books, the plans for marriage, the gas pump on the Stradonr. — Elena Ferrante

How difficult it was to find one's way, how difficult it was not to violate any of the incredibly detailed male regulations. — Elena Ferrante

Even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina. — Elena Ferrante