Elena Ferrante Quotes
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When there’s too much silence, she said, so many ideas come to mind, I don’t pay attention. Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause, there are the likable ones and the unlikable, the good and the bad, everything in the end consoles.
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She spoke with a different sort of determination, calmer, as if it were no longer necessary to fight to the death for every little thing.
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That he’s no one. And for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else.
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...but I was bored, I could scarcely understand them. I started to borrow novels from the circulating library, and read one after the other. But in the long run they didn't help. They presented intense lives, profound conversations, a phantom reality more appealing than my real life. So, in order to feel as if I were not real, I sometimes went...
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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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I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new.
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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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We are flying over a ball of fire.
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A broken clock that, because its metal heart continued to beat, was now breaking the time of everything else.
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We told each other everything, even the little things, and were happy.
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He didn't want her the way he generally wanted women, to feel them under him, to turn them over, turn them again, open them up, break them, step on them, and crush them. He didn't want her in order to have sex and then forget her. He wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last.
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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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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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Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
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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 dreams of the head ended up beneath the feet.
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Books are written so their authors can be heard, not so that they remain silent.
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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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Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.
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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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Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote.
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Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive.
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Only when we feel the story in each of its moments or places are we able to tell it properly.
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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 abandonment.