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

I, too, would find out that old age is a brute, ferocious beast. — Elena Ferrante

A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties. — Elena Ferrante

Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object. Was — Elena Ferrante

Nino has something that's eating him inside, like Lila, and it's a gift and a suffering; they aren't content, they never give in, they fear what is happening around them. — 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

She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy. — 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

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

Who says I'm vain?" "The comparison: your friend isn't. But I'm sorry for her, vanity is a resource. If you're vain you pay attention to yourself and your affairs. — Elena Ferrante

You can't leave me here to hope, when in reality you've already decided everything. — 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

Was it possible that I - short, too full-figured, wearing glasses, I diligent but not intelligent, I who pretended to be cultured, informed, when I wasn't - could have believed that he would like me even just for the length of a vacation? — Elena Ferrante

On Napoli, Elena Ferrante is more ferocious than Roberto Savino. — Angela Paolantonio

The fictional treatment of biographical material - a treatment that for me is essential - is full of traps. — Elena Ferrante

Women, in all fields - whether mothers or not - still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections. — 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

I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows. — Elena Ferrante

How quickly people changed, with their interests, their feelings. Well-made phrases replaced by well-made phrases, time is a flow of words coherent only in appearance, the one who piles up the most is the one who wins. — Elena Ferrante

It wasn't innocent blood. To my father nothing about Amalia ever seemed innocent. He, so furious, so bitter and yet so eager for pleasure, so irascible and so egotistical, couldn't bear that she had a friendly, at times even joyful, relationship with the world. He recognized in it a trace of betrayal. — Elena Ferrante

I gave in continuously, with painful pleasure, to waves of unhappiness. — Elena Ferrante

It's hard to explain why, but that regret made me suffer. It seemed to be the sign of a true interest in Lila, something much stronger than the compliments for my discipline as a constant reader. It occurred to me that if Lila had taken out just a single book a year, on that book she would have left her imprint and the teacher would have felt it the moment she returned it, which I left no mark, I embodied only the persistence with which I added volume to volume in no particular order. — 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

We gazed at the constellations, praising the portentous architecture of the sky with trite formulas. — Elena Ferrante

Not for you," Lila replies ardently, "you're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls. — Elena Ferrante

My tone must have seemed hostile, even though I wasn't angry or offended; there was just a touch of sarcasm. He tried to respond but he did so in an awkward, muddled way, half in dialect, half in Italian. He said he was sure that his mother was wandering around Naples as usual. — 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 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

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

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

He said we lived in a provincial country, where every occasion was an opportunity for complaining, but meanwhile no one rolled up his sleeves and reorganized things, trying to make them function. — Elena Ferrante

I had the impression that, although I was absorbing much of that sight, many things, too many, were scattering around me without letting me grasp them. — Elena Ferrante

Sarratore's son is really unbearable. — 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

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

At the ponds that evening I said to Antonio: "It's always been like that, since we were little: everyone thinks she's bad and I'm good."
He kissed me, murmuring ironically, "Why, isn't that true?"
That response touched me and kept me from telling him that we had to part. It was a decision that seemed to me urgent, the affection wasn't love, I loved Nino, I knew I would love him forever. I had a gentle speech prepared for Antonio, I wanted to say to him: It's been wonderful, you helped me a lot at a time when I was sad, but now school is starting and this year is going to be difficult, I have new subjects, I'll have to study a lot; I'm sorry but we have to stop. I felt it was necessary and every afternoon I went to our meeting at the ponds with my little speech ready. But he was so affectionate, so passionate, that my courage failed and I put it off. — Elena Ferrante

I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet — Elena Ferrante

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

What is clear to me, always, is that the writing must never lose sight of truth as its ultimate goal. Page after page, the drive to capture what is true, and not what resembles the truth, shapes the work. If, even for a few passages, the tone becomes false - that is, too studied, too limpid, too regimented, too well-phrased - I am obliged to stop and to figure out where I started to go wrong. If I can't, I throw everything away. — Elena Ferrante

I began to weep with loneliness. What was I, who was I? I felt pretty again, my pimples were gone, the sun and the sea had made me slimmer, and yet the person I liked and whom I wished to be liked by showed no interest in me. — Elena Ferrante

How lovely the months, the years with him had been. At the moment I hadn't understood their importance, and now here I was, growing sad. The rain the cold the snow the scents of Spring along the Arno and on the flowering streets of the city, the warmth we gave each other. Choosing a dress, glasses. His pleasure in changing me. And Paris, the exciting trip to a foreign country, the cafes, the politics, the literature, the revolution that would soon arrive, even though the working class was becoming integrated. And him. His room at night. His body. All finished. I tossed nervously in my bed unable to sleep. I'm lying to myself , I thought. Had it really been so wonderful ? I knew very well that at that time, too, there had been shame. And uneasiness, and humiliation, and disgust: accept, submit force yourself. Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to rigorous examination — Elena Ferrante

As long as one writes only for oneself, writing is a free act by means of which, to use an oxymoron, one secretly opens oneself. — Elena Ferrante

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

Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive. — Elena Ferrante

That last phrase, the elegant jump from malicious gossip to compliment, seemed to me so very successful that I thought of adult normality precisely as an art of that type. I had something to learn. — Elena Ferrante

uncultured youths who make random pronouncements on everything — Elena Ferrante

At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions. — 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

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose. — Elena Ferrante

Such tensions without sense push us to formulate questions of meaning. — 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

The elegant jump from malicious gossip to compliment, seemed to me so very successful that I thought of adult normality precisely as an art of that type. — Elena Ferrante

Maybe there's something mistaken in this desire men have to instruct us; I was young at the time, and I didn't realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn't like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn't want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman. And today when he no longer senses me as part of himself, he feels betrayed. I — Elena Ferrante

Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. — 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

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. — Elena Ferrante

I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence. — Elena Ferrante

My river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full — Elena Ferrante

I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned. — Elena Ferrante

You still waste time with those things, Lenu? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Do you want to see the string of pearls that Stefano gave me? — Elena Ferrante

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

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

The blood spurted from his neck and hit a copper pot hanging on the wall. — 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

Even if I tried to tell myself that I had given him nothing, that the children were mostly mine, that they had remained within the radius of my body, subject to my care, still I couldn't avoid thinking what aspects of his nature inevitably lay hidden in them. [ ... ] How much of him would I be forced to love forever, without even realizing it, simply by virtue of the fact that I loved them? What a complex foamy mixture a couple is. Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn't die, it doesn't want to die. — 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

If you don't try, nothing ever changes. — Elena Ferrante

She did not still feel, as I did, the anxiety about a woman who was suffering for love. What did I care about shoes. I still had, in my mind's eye, the most secret stages of that affair of violated trust, passion, poetry that became a book, and it was as if she and I had read a novel together, as if we had seen, there in the back of the shop and not in the parish hall on Sunday, a dramatic film. I — Elena Ferrante

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

I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful. — Elena Ferrante

But I felt that things were taking a turn for the worse, and I was frightened. Having to stay alert in order to avoid mistakes and confront dangers had exhausted me to the point where sometimes simply the urgency of doing something made me think that I really had done it. — 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

Estrangement and belonging, an effect of distance and closeness at the same time. — Elena Ferrante

Love in my case is not indispensable to pleasure, nor is respect. Is it possible, therefore, that the disgust, the humiliation begin afterward, when a man subdues you and violates you at his pleasure solely because now you belong to him, love or not, respect or not? — Elena Ferrante

The conclusion we drew from this convinced us that it was best to do everything on purpose, deliberately, so that you would know what to expect. — Elena Ferrante

Even as a child, he said, I knew I wasn't what the others thought but not what I thought, either. I said to myself: I'm another thing, a thing hidden in the veins, it has no name and waits. — Elena Ferrante

Amalia had the unpredictability of a splinter, I couldn't impose on her the prison of a single adjective. — Elena Ferrante

Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school? Or had she brought me back in such a hurry so that I would avoid punishment? Or - I wonder today - did she want at different moments both things? — Elena Ferrante

On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins, The term isn't mine, she always used it. She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared. That night, on the terrace where we were celebrating the arrival of 1959, when she was abruptly struck by that sensation, she was frightened and kept it to herself, still unable to name it. It was only years later, one night in November 1980
we were thirty-six, were married, had children
that she recounted in detail what had happened to her then, what still sometimes happened to her, and she used that term for the first time. — Elena Ferrante

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

She went like that saint who, although she still has her head on her shoulders, is carrying it in her hands, as if it had already been cut off. — 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 kept repeating that if she had dedicated herself assiduously to every child in the neighborhood, in a generation everything would change, there would no longer be the smart and the incompetent, the good and the bad. Then she looked at her son and again burst out crying. — Elena Ferrante

You really work in those conditions?"

She, irritated by the contact, pulled her arm away, protesting: "And how do you work, the two of you, how do you work?"

They didn't answer. They worked hard, that was obvious. And at least Enzo in front of him, in the factory, women worn out by the work, by humiliations, by domestic obligations no less than Lila was. Yet now they were both angry because of the conditions _she_ worked in; they couldn't tolerate it. 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 even at the risk of being killed. In the face of that silence Lila got even angrier. "Fuck off," she said, "you and the working class. — Elena Ferrante

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

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

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

That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighbourhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swallen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts ( ... ) they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls ( ... ) They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? — Elena Ferrante

Reason, by a weariness that made everything around — Elena Ferrante

But I was bored, I could scarcely understand them. I started to borrow novels from the circulating library, and read one after the other. But in the long run they didn't help. They presented intense lives, profound conversations, a phantom reality more appealing than my real life. So, in order to feel as if I were not real, I sometimes went ... — 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

We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves. — Elena Ferrante

Up or down, it seemed to us that we were always going toward something terrible that had existed before us yet had always been waiting for us, just for us. When you haven't been in the world long, it's hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don't even feel the need to. 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, or the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this is the night. — 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

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

We are flying over a ball of fire. — Elena Ferrante