Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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.
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She stood out among so many because she, naturally, did not submit to any training, to any use, or to any purpose. All of us had submitted and that submission had—through trials, failures, successes—reduced us. Only Lila, nothing and no one seemed to reduce her. Rather, even if over the years she became as stupid and intractable as anyone, the qualities that we had attributed to her would remain intact, maybe they would be magnified. Even when we hated her we ended by respecting her and fearing her.
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Don’t succumb. Fight. You are of today, take hold of today, don’t regress, don’t lose yourself, keep a tight grip. Above all, don’t give in to distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness.
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I, too, would find out that old age is a brute, ferocious beast.
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Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?
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Eliminating herself was a sort of aesthetic project. 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.
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I wanted him to see in that plate of pasta everything that, by leaving, he would no longer be able to look at, or touch, or caress, listen to, smell: never again.
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We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.
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Yes, yes, resign yourself to what you are, each on his own path.
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Estrangement and belonging, an effect of distance and closeness at the same time.
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You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.
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I am clean I am true I am playing with my cards on the table.
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Most of those who came were women, and I was now much criticized, now much praised by opposing groups. At first I was frightened, but Mariarosa interceded with authority and I discovered in myself an unsuspected capacity to summarize disagreement and agreement, choosing in the meantime a role as mediator. I was good at saying in a convincing way: That isn’t exactly what I meant.
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I mean that a party can’t be anything other than a distributor of favors in exchange for support, ideals are part of the furniture.
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I concluded that first of all I had to understand better what I was. Investigate my nature as a woman. I had been excessive, I had striven to give myself male capacities. I thought I had to know everything, be concerned with everything. What did I care about politics, about struggles. I wanted to make a good impression on men, be at their level. At the level of what, of their reason, most unreasonable.
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What did I care anymore about his political opinions, about Pasquale and Nadia, about the death of Ulrike Meinhof, the birth of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the electoral advances of the Communist Party? 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.
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To tolerate existence, we lie, and we lie above all to ourselves. Sometimes we tell ourselves lovely tales, sometimes petty lies. Falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reflection, they dilute the horrors of our time, they even save us from ourselves.
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How heavy a body that has been traversed by death is, life is light, there's no need to let anyone make it heavy for us.
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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.
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At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father’s shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer. They were all laughing, even Lila, with the expression of one who has a role and will play it to the utmost.
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Ah, the violence: tearing, killing, ripping. Lila, between fascination and horror, spoke to me in a mixture of dialect, Italian, and very educated quotations that she had taken from who knows where and remembered by heart. The entire planet, she said, is a big Fosso Carbonario.
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For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first.
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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.
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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.