Elena Ferrante Quotes
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..what a terrible thing a dissatisfied mind is.
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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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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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Now that I was surrounded by admiration, I could admit without uneasiness that talking to her incited ideas, pushed me to make connections between distant things. In those years of being neighbors, I on the floor above, she below, it often happened. A slight push was enough and the seemingly empty mind discovered that it was full and lively. I attributed to her a sort of farsightedness, as I had all our lives, and I found nothing wrong with it. I said to myself that to be adult was to recognize that I needed her impulses. If once I had hidden, even from myself, that spark she induced in me, now I was proud of it, I had even written about it somewhere. I was I and for that very reason I could make space for her in me and give her an enduring form. She instead didn’t want to be her, so she couldn’t do the same. That was the underlying cause of the illness that she called “dissolving boundaries.
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Translation is our salvation: it draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.
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At first I had great expectations, and even if I didn’t say so clearly to myself I was glad to be there with Gigliola Spagnuolo rather than with Lila. In some very secret part of myself I looked forward to a school where she would never enter, where, in her absence, I would be the best student, and which I would sometimes tell her about, boasting. But immediately I began to falter, many of the others proved to be better than me. I ended up with Gigliola in a kind.
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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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I doubt that work ennobles man and I am absolutely certain that it does not ennoble woman.
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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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I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new.
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There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors.
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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.
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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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...a woman without love for her origins is lost.
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My work stops at publication. If the books don't contain in themselves their reasons for being - questions and answers - it means I was wrong to have them published.
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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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That even if we're constantly tempted to lower our guard -- out of love, or weariness, or sympathy, or kindness-- we women shouldn't do it. We can lose from one moment to the next everything that we have achieved.
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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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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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Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life.
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The whole future---I thought---will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning.
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It seemed to me that I had mastered words to the point of sweeping away forever the contradictions of being in the world, the surge of emotions, and breathless speech. In short, I now knew a method of speaking and writing that—by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn’t supposed to fail—sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object.
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Move on another plane in the name of one's own difference.