Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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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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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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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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I doubt that work ennobles man and I am absolutely certain that it does not ennoble woman.
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I wrote my book to free myself from it, not to be its prisoner.
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We told each other everything, even the little things, and were happy.
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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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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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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 mother always saw evil where, to my great annoyance, it was sooner or later discovered that evil really was, and her crossed eye seemed made purposely to identify the secret motives of the neighborhood.
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Engineering -nature is engineering, so is culture, science is right behind, only chaos is not an engineer- and, along with it, the furious need to reproduce.
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Because what is the face, what finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise, rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature.
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As I traveled toward Milan, I discovered that, with Lila set aside, I didn’t know how to give myself substance except by modeling myself on Nino. I was incapable of being a model for myself. Without him I no longer had a nucleus from which to expand outside the neighborhood and through the world, I was a pile of debris.
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It was predictable, of course, but now that a date had been fixed, March 12th, it was as if I had been strolling absentmindedly and banged into a door.
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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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She was suggesting that I separate also from my third child. She seemed to be saying: Imma would be better off and so would you. I replied: If Imma leaves me, too, my life will no longer have meaning. But she smiled: Where is it written that lives should have meaning?
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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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I thought: yes, Lila is right, the beauty of things is a trick, the sky is the throne of fear; I'm alive, now, here, ten steps from the water, and it is not beautiful, it's terrifying; along with this beach, the sea, the swarm of animal forms, I am part of the universal terror.
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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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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
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The daily standard of unlivability isn’t news. So when the exceptional passes, everything is silent and everything continues to rot.
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It was as if she wanted to take the power away even from the realistic possibility of violent death by reducing it to words, to a form that could be controlled.
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Lies are better than tranquilizers.