Elena Ferrante Quotes
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Others haven’t had the same luck. In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. When those horrors release a violence that reaches into our cities and our habits we’re startled, we’re alarmed.
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The angel of death, she said proudly, touched me when I was a child, with the exact same illness as now, but I screwed him, even though I was just a girl. And you'll see, I'll screw him again, because I know how to suffer. I learned at the age of ten, I haven't stopped since. And if you know how to suffer, the angel respects you, after a while he goes away. As she spoke she pulled up her dress and showed me the injured leg like the relic of an old battle. She smacked it, observing me with a fixed half-smile on her lips and terrified eyes.
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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.
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They were just like the relations from whom I had fled as a girl. I couldn’t bear them and yet they held me tight, I had them all inside me.
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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.
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I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart . . . But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts ...
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Why would anyone be interested in my little personal story if we can do without Homer's or Shakespeare's? Someone who truly loves literature is like a person of faith. The believer knows very well that there is nothing at all at the bureau of vital statistics about the Jesus that truly counts for him.
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He didn't want her the way he generally wanted women, to feel them under him, to turn them over, turn them again, open them up, break them, step on them, and crush them. He didn't want her in order to have sex and then forget her. He wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last.
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I still remember him fondly, there in the doorway. He was absolutely the first person to show me how comfortable it is to arrive in a strange, potentially hostile environment, and discover that you have been preceded by your reputation, that you don't have to do anything to be accepted, that your name is known, that everyone knows about you, and it's the others, the strangers, who must strive to win your favor, and not you theirs.
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Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.
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I couldn’t calm down. Was it possible that Mario should leave me like this, without warning? It seemed to me incredible that all of a sudden he had become uninterested in my life, like a plant watered for years that is abruptly allowed to die of drought. I couldn’t conceive that he had unilaterally decided that he no longer owed me any attention.
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I soon discovered that I was getting used to being happy and unhappy at the same time, as if that were the new, inevitable law of my life.
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Where is it written that lives should have a meaning? So she began to disparage all that struggle of mine to write. She said mockingly: Is the meaning that line of black markings that look like insect shit?
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Maybe I should tell her that things without a meaning are the most beautiful ones.
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You know how children are, sometimes they love you by cuddling you, other times by trying to remake you from the start, reinvent you, as if they thought you were badly brought up and they had to teach you how to get on in the world, what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to see, the words you should use and those you shouldn’t because they’re old now, no one says that anymore.
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She became transparent skin over bones, her eyes drowning in violet wells, her hands damp spider webs.
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You're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.
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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.
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The attentions of Pasquale Peluso consoled me greatly, I liked that he made me laugh. Maybe I’m not so ugly, I thought, maybe I can’t see myself.
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She never said a word to me of anger or discontent. She began instead to go around with Carmela Peluso, the daughter of the carpenter-gambler, as if I were no longer enough. Within a few days we became a trio, in which, however, I, who had been first in school, was almost always the third. They talked and joked continuously with each other, or, rather, Lila talked and joked, Carmela listened and was amused. When we went for a walk between the church and the stradone, Lila was always in the middle and the two of us on the sides. If I noticed that she tended to be closer to Carmela I suffered and wanted to go home.
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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.
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The problem is that real change takes a long time, while life hits us right away, now, with all its contradictions.
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I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes.
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As a girl - twelve, thirteen years old - I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me.