Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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.
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In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.
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So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him.
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I said to myself every day: I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured.
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Elena Ferrante is the author of several novels. There is nothing mysterious about her, given how she manifests herself - perhaps even too much - in her own writing, the place where her creative life transpires in absolute fullness.
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Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realized it for the first time only in that situation. 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.
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I’ll give you treasure chests full of gold pieces, I know the value of spending time with you.
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I felt squeezed in that vise along with the mass of everyday things and people, and I had a bad taste in my mouth, a permanent sense of nausea that exhausted me, as if everything, thus compacted, and always tighter, were grinding me up, reducing me to a repulsive cream.
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Today I know what I felt, but then I didn't understand. At that instant I had only an unpleasant impression, as if he had given the signal and from then on all I could do was to sink by degrees into repugnance. In reality I felt above all a blaze of hatred toward myself, because I was there, because I had no excuses, because it was I who had decided to come, because it seemed to me that I could not retreat.
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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.
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When there’s too much silence, she said, so many ideas come to mind, I don’t pay attention. 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.
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The daily standard of unlivability isn’t news. So when the exceptional passes, everything is silent and everything continues to rot.
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Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it.
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But a favor has to be answered by another favor, and the courtesies became a chain that imprisoned us.
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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.
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I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new.
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As for the minor characters, it seemed natural for each of them to have his good or bad moment in the life of the protagonists and then slip into the background, just as when we think back on our existence and, of the many people who entered the flow of our lives, remember almost nothing.
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She was skinny, like a salted anchovy, she gave off an odor of wildness, she had a long face, narrow at the temples, framed by two bands of smooth black hair.
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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.
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The blood spurted from his neck and hit a copper pot hanging on the wall.
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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.
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Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.
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For the first time, I left Naples, left Campania. I discovered that I was afraid of everything: afraid of taking the wrong train, afraid of having to pee and not knowing where to do it, afraid that it would be night and I wouldn’t be able to orient myself in an unfamiliar city, afraid of being robbed. I put all my money in my bra, as my mother did, and spent hours in a state of wary anxiety that coexisted seamlessly with a growing sense of liberation.
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We discussed ourselves a lot. But although we were women…we struggled to understand what a woman was. Our every move or thought or conversation or dream, once analyzed in depth, seemed not to belong to us. And this excavation seemed to exasperate those who were weaker, who couldn’t tolerate such an excess of self-reflection and believed that to embark on the road of freedom it was simply enough to cut off men. These were unstable times, arcing in waves. Many of us feared a return to the flat calm and stayed on the crest, holding on to extreme formulations and looking down with fear and rage.