Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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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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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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Next to her, in the place where we were born, I was only a decoration, that is, I bore witness to Lila’s merits. Those who had known us from birth attributed to her, to the force of her attraction, the fact that the neighborhood could have on its streets an esteemed person like me.
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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.
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Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
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In conversations with my daughters I hear omitted words or phrases. Sometimes they get mad, they say Mama, I never said that, you’re saying it, you invented it. But I invent nothing; you just have to listen—the unspoken says more than the spoken.
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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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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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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 marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.
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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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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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We are flying over a ball of fire.
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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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When I returned home that night with the children, I felt the close, comfortable warmth of the apartment for the first time since the abandonmen.
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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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.
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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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Why did she talk to me about how soles were ground and not about what she read?
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Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote. I remember the dialect on my mother's lips when she lost that gentle cadence and yelled at us, poisoned by her unhappiness: I can't take you anymore, I can't take any more. Commands, shouts, insults, life stretching into her words, as when a frayed nerve is just touched, and the pain scrapes away all self-control.
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Don’t be timid. You’re a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present. And begin with the scum in your area, put their backs to the wall.
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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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To carry out any project to which you attach your own name you have to love yourself.