Elena Ferrante Quotes
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... my mother, before she became my mother, was followed by the man with whom she would make love, who would cover her with his name, who would annihilate her with his alphabet.
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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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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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I stayed in a dark corner of the house dreaming the story of the poverella's waterlogged, lifeless body, a silver anchovy to be preserved in salt. And whenever, later, I played at whipping the air to get it to whine, I thought of her, the woman in salt. I heard the voice of her drowning, as she slid through the water all night, as far as Capo Miseno. Now, just thinking about it, I felt like whipping the air of the pinewood harder and harder, like a child, to evoke the spirits, perhaps to chase them away, and the more energy I put into it, the sharper the whistle became. I burst into laughter, alone, seeing myself like that, a thirty-eight-year-old woman in serious trouble who suddenly returns to her childhood game. Yes, I said to myself, we do, we imagine, even as adults, a lot of silly things, out of joy or exhaustion. And I laughed, waving that long thin branch, and felt more and more like laughing.
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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 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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The reasonableness of others and my own desire for tranquility got on my nerves. The breath built up in my throat, ready to vibrate with words of rage. I felt the need to quarrel, and in fact I quarreled first with our male friends, then with their wives or girlfriends, and finally I went on to clash with anyone, male or female, who tried to help me accept what was happening to my life.
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You're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.
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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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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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Then Pasquale himself began to be silent, defeated by Lila’s capacity to link one thing to another in a chain that tightened around you on all sides.
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..what a terrible thing a dissatisfied mind is.
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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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That my cult of study had always seemed to her foolish, that it wasn’t books that made people good but good people who made some good books.
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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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I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new.
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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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The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.
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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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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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...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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You know how children are, sometimes they love you by cuddling you, other times by trying to remake you from the start, reinvent you, as if they thought you were badly brought up and they had to teach you how to get on in the world, what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to see, the words you should use and those you shouldn’t because they’re old now, no one says that anymore.
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I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes.