Elena Ferrante Quotes
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Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.
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Love in my case is not indispensable to pleasure, nor is respect. Is it possible, therefore, that the disgust, the humiliation begin afterward, when a man subdues you and violates you at his pleasure solely because now you belong to him, love or not, respect or not?
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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.
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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 felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new.
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I had always considered sex an ultimate sticky reality, the least mediated contact possible with another body. Instead, after that experience, I was convinced that sex is an extreme product of the imagination. The greater the pleasure, the more the other is only a dream, a nocturnal reaction of belly, breasts, mouth, anus―of every isolated inch of skin―to the caresses and thrusts of a vague entity definable according to the necessities of the moment.
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He’s marrying me to have a faithful servant, that’s the reason all men get married.
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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.
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Both Pasquale and Rino turned out to be surprisingly good dancers, and we learned from them the tango, the waltz, the polka, and the mazurka.
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One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.
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Maybe I should tell her that things without a meaning are the most beautiful ones.
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There are people who leave and people who know how to be left.
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...a woman without love for her origins is lost.
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Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.
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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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Reading and writing are closed-room activities, which literally take you away from the gaze of others. The greater risk is that they also remove others from your gaze.
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“It was the word for a disquiet not otherwise definable, it referred to a miscellaneous crowd of things in her head, debris in a muddy water of the brain. The frantumaglia was mysterious, it provoked mysterious actions, it was the source of all suffering not traceable to a single obvious cause.
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I reshuffled the cards that by now we knew well enough. I spoke of the before and the after, of the old generation and of ours, of how we were different, of how she and Stefano were different. And this last argument made a breach, seduced her, I returned to it passionately. She listened to me in silence, evidently she wanted to be helped to compose herself, and slowly she did.
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If I could conceal from myself the impression that the life had been drained out of me like blood and saliva and mucus from a patient during an operation, maybe I could deceive Mario as well.
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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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One becomes affectionate toward men slowly, whether they coincide or not with whomever in the various phases of life we have taken as the model of a man.
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You can be hurt only if you love someone. But I don’t love anyone.
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I wrote my book to free myself from it, not to be its prisoner.
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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.