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At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.
Elena Ferrante -
I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart . . . But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts ...
Elena Ferrante
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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.
Elena Ferrante -
Maybe the wealth we wanted as children is this, I thought: not strongboxes full of diamonds and gold coins but a bathtub, to immerse yourself like this every day, to eat bread, salami, prosciutto, to have a lot of space even in the bathroom, to have a telephone, a pantry and icebox full of food, a photograph in a silver frame on the sideboard that shows you in your wedding dress—to have this entire house, with the kitchen, the bedroom, the dining room, the two balconies, and the little room where I am studying, and where, even though Lila hasn’t said so, soon, when it comes, a baby will sleep.
Elena Ferrante -
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.
Elena Ferrante -
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.
Elena Ferrante -
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.
Elena Ferrante -
It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.
Elena Ferrante
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Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.
Elena Ferrante -
He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.
Elena Ferrante -
Everything is interesting if you know how to work on it.
Elena Ferrante -
When the baby emerged and I saw her, black-haired, a violet organism that, full of energy, writhed and wailed, I felt a physical pleasure so piercing that I still know no other pleasure that compares to it.
Elena Ferrante -
So pleasure was this: breaking, mixing, no longer knowing what was mine and what was his.
Elena Ferrante -
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.
Elena Ferrante
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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.
Elena Ferrante -
Felt that if I ran away with the others I would leave with her something of mine that she would never give back.
Elena Ferrante -
It wasn't innocent blood. To my father nothing about Amalia ever seemed innocent. He, so furious, so bitter and yet so eager for pleasure, so irascible and so egotistical, couldn't bear that she had a friendly, at times even joyful, relationship with the world. He recognized in it a trace of betrayal.
Elena Ferrante -
And to keep under control the anxieties of change I had, finally, taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm, my voice held back in my throat so that I would not make a spectacle of myself.
Elena Ferrante -
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.” I waited in silence.
Elena Ferrante -
To carry out any project to which you attach your own name you have to love yourself.
Elena Ferrante
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A book should push the reader to confront himself and the world.
Elena Ferrante -
...the dreams of the head ended up beneath the feet.
Elena Ferrante -
To write, you have to want something to survive you. I don’t even have the desire to live, I’ve never had it strongly the way you have. If I could eliminate myself now, while we’re speaking, I’d be more than happy. Imagine if I’m going to start writing.
Elena Ferrante -
Amalia had the unpredictability of a splinter, I couldn't impose on her the prison of a single adjective.
Elena Ferrante