Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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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.
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How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they're at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function. To say : I am your history, you begin from me, listen to me, it could be useful to you.
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When the task we give ourselves has the urgency of passion, there's nothing that can keep us from completing it.
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Everything about these times, I have to say, worries me, but that the majority of the human race - women, children, men - is subjected in various ways to the effects of inequality seems to me at the core of all the problems that consume us. Above all, inequality generates an extraordinary waste of minds and creative energies, which, if they were trained and put to use, would likely make our history an active laboratory for repairing the damage we’ve caused so far - or at least of controlling its effects, rather than an unbearable list of horrors. - from Incidental Inventions
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How can I explain to this woman—I thought—that from the age of six I've been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?
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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.
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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.
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The balcony extended over the void like a diving board over a pool.
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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.
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I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts.
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What I expect from a good story is that it will tell me today what I can't know from any other source but that story, from its unique way of putting something into words, from the feeling that it implies.
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In fiction we say and recognize things about ourselves, which, for the sake of propriety, we ignore or don't talk about in reality.
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Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.
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I let his rose wither in a vase on my desk, a vase painfully empty of flowers since the long-ago time when, on my birthday, Mario would give me a cattleya, in imitation of Swann. In the evening the flower was already black and bent on its stem. I threw it in the trash.
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I wasn't capable of entrusting myself to true feelings. I didn't know how to be drawn beyond limits. I didn't possess that emotional power that had driven Lila to do all she could to enjoy that day and that night. I stayed behind, waiting. She, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn't afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings. She deserved Nino, in other words, because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not hope that he would want her.
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I pay attention to every system of conventions and expectations, above all literary conventions and the expectations they generate in readers. But that law-abiding side of me, sooner or later, has to face my disobedient side. And, in the end, the latter always wins.
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I felt like a drop of rain in a spiderweb, and I was careful not to slide down.
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When the baby emerged and I saw her, black-haired, a violet organism that, full of energy, writhed and wailed, I felt a physical pleasure so piercing that I still know no other pleasure that compares to it.
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A broken clock that, because its metal heart continued to beat, was now breaking the time of everything else.
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I didn't hear what he said, but I felt like laughing at his artificial imperiousness. The laugh took away every desire to attack, drained me... React. I began to tidy up. When I had finished I began again, a kind of roundup of everything that didn't appear to be in order. Lucidity, determination, hold on to life.
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Every choice has its history, so many moments of our existence are shoved into a corner, waiting for an outlet, and in the end the outlet arrives.
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Today I feel some uneasiness in recalling how much I suffered, I have no sympathy for myself of that time.
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In the first year of Martha`s life I discovered that I no longer loved my husband. A hard year, the baby barely slept and wouldn`t let me sleep. Physical tiredness is a magnifying glass. I was too tired to study, to think, to laugh, to cry, to love that man who was too intelligent, too stubbornly involved in his wager with life, too absent. Love required energy, I hand none left. When he began with caresses and kisses, I became anxious, I felt that I was a stimulus abused for his solitary pleasures.