Elena Ferrante Quotes
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You can be hurt only if you love someone. But I don’t love anyone.
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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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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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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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Nino has something that's eating him inside, like Lila, and it's a gift and a suffering; they aren't content, they never give in, they fear what is happening around them.
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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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There is a poverty that makes us all cruel.
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Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.
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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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“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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We told each other everything, even the little things, and were happy.
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The next day, at breakfast and during the entire drive to Milan, he talked passionately about what he considered the most exciting period of his life, the years between 1945 and 1948. I heard in his voice a genuine melancholy, which vanished, however, when he went on to describe with an equally genuine enthusiasm the new climate of revolution, the energy—he said—that was infusing young and old. I kept nodding yes, struck by how important it was for him to convince me that my present was in fact the return of his thrilling past.
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The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.
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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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But I’ve always had a low voice, I can’t yell, the words fall a short distance away like a handful of pebbles thrown by a child.
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Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote.
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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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The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.
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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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Speaking, I wished to eliminate both me and him, in that bed, different from the children of long ago. We had in common only the violence we had witnessed.
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Nowhere is it written that you can’t do it.
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As a result of subduing the forces of nature with the tools that we invent, we find ourselves today at the point where the force of our tools has become a greater concern than the forces of nature.
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That is the situation in the factory where I work. The union has never gone in and the workers are nothing but poor victims of blackmail, dependent on the law of the owner, that is: I pay you and so I possess you and I possess your life, your family, and everything that surrounds you, and if you don’t do as I say I’ll ruin you.
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I had the impression that, although I was absorbing much of that sight, many things, too many, were scattering around me without letting me grasp them.