Elena Ferrante Quotes
-
There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.
-
Oh of course it pleased me, it pleased me greatly. But I also felt as if my body had the consistency of egg shell, and a slight pressure on my arm, on my forehead, on my stomach would be enough to break it and dig out all my secrets, in particular those which were secrets even to me.
-
It was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.
-
We grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.
-
In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.
-
We are tornadoes that pick up fragments with the most varied historical and biological origins. This makes of us -- thankfully -- fickle agglomerations that maintain a fragile equilibrium, that are inconsistent and complex, that can't be reduced to any fixed framework that does not inevitably leave out a great deal. Which is why the more effective stories resemble ramparts from which one can gaze out at everything that has been excluded.
-
In reality it was much simpler. For at least ten years the God of childhood, already fairly weak, had been pushed aside like an old sick person, and I felt no need for the sanctity of marriage.
-
What seemed to interest and absorb her most was that all that filth, all that chaos of broken limbs and dug-out eyes and split heads was then covered—literally covered—by a church dedicated to San Giovanni Battista and by a monastery of Augustinian hermits who had a valuable library. Ah, ah—she laughed—underneath there’s blood and above, God, peace, prayer, and books.
-
I saw her fly toward the asphalt and felt a cruel joy. She seemed to me, as she fell, an ugly creature.
-
The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.
-
Today I feel some uneasiness in recalling how much I suffered, I have no sympathy for myself of that time.
-
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.
-
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.
-
And the plane began it's takeoff. How exciting it was to lift off from the ground with a jerk and see the houses that became parallelepipettes and the streets that changed into strips and the countryside that was reduced to a green patch and the sea that inclined like a compact paving stone and the clouds that fell below in a landslide of soft rocks and the anguish, the pain, the very happiness that became a part of a unique luminous motion. It seemed to me that flying subjected everything to a process of simplification and I sighed, I tried to lose myself. Every so often I asked Nino "are you happy?" and he nodded yes, kissed me. At times I had the impression that the floor under my feet, the only surface I could count on, was trembling.
-
People died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse, and yet, in every round of voting, gave their enthusiastic approval to the politicians who made their life unbearable.
-
Someone who takes love away from us devastates the cultural structure we've worked on all our lives, deprives us of that sort of Eden that until that moment had made us appear innocent and lovable. Human beings give the worst of themselves when their cultural clothes are torn off, and they find themselves facing the nakedness of their bodies, they feel the shame of them. In a certain sense the loss of love is the common experience closest to the myth of the expulsion from the earthly paradise: it's the violent end of the illusion of having a heavenly body, it's the discovery of one's own dispensability and perishability.
-
I devoted myself to the house, to the children, to Pietro. Not once did I think of having Clelia back or of replacing her with someone else. Again, I took on everything, and certainly I did it to put myself in a stupor. But it happened without effort, without bitterness, as if I had suddenly discovered that this was the right way of spending one's life, and a part of me whispered: Enough of those silly notions in your head.
-
Something had begun to emanate from Lila’s mobile body that the males sensed, an energy that dazed them, like the swelling sound of beauty arriving. The music had to stop before they returned to themselves.
-
Places of the imagination are visited in books. Seen in reality they may be hard to recognize; they are disappointing, they might even seem fake.
-
The balcony extended over the void like a diving board over a pool.
-
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.
-
Competition between women is good only if it does not prevail; that is to say if it coexists with affinity, affection, with a real sense of being mutually indispensable, with sudden peaks of solidarity in spite of envy, jealousy and the whole inevitable cohort of bad feelings.
-
Because what is the face, what finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise, rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature.
-
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.