Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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But the happy ending has to do with the tricks of the narrative, not with life, or even love, which is an uncontrollable, changeable feeling, with nasty surprises that are alien to the happy ending.
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Evidently what in the fiction of the story serves in all innocence to reach the heart of the reader becomes an abomination for one who feels the echo of the facts she has really lived.
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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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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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I’ll give you treasure chests full of gold pieces, I know the value of spending time with you.
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Lies are better than tranquilizers.
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And they thought that what had happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too.
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I slept again but only for a few minutes. Then I fell into a torpor crowded with images, in which, without wanting to, I began to tell myself about my mother.
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I’ve never been in analysis. But it’s rare that one saves oneself from a rickety landing at the top of a building by throwing oneself down the stairwell.
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I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows.
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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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Then Pasquale himself began to be silent, defeated by Lila’s capacity to link one thing to another in a chain that tightened around you on all sides.
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Why did she talk to me about how soles were ground and not about what she read?
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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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You’re really doing well, it’s the satisfaction you get from school, it’s love,” Lila said to me, and I felt that she was a little sad.
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My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine, in the words that I've uttered, in which there's often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers, in my less which is such because of her more, in my more which is the yielding to the force of her less.
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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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I liked to discover connections like that, especially if they concerned Lila. I traced lines between moments and events distant from one another, I established convergences and divergences. In that period it became a daily exercise: the better off I had been in Ischia, the worse off Lila had been in the desolation of the neighborhood; the more I had suffered upon leaving the island, the happier she had become. It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing.
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Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.
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I understood that I had arrived there full of pride and realized that—in good faith, certainly, with affection—I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and 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.
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In order not to cut out a large part of one's private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.
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One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.
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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.