Elena Ferrante Quotes
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We told each other everything, even the little things, and were happy.
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Words for being lost or for being found.
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My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine, in the words that I've uttered, in which there's often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers, in my less which is such because of her more, in my more which is the yielding to the force of her less.
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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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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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A book, an article, could make noise, but ancient warriors before the battle also made noise, and if it wasn’t accompanied by real force and immeasurable violence it was only theater.
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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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And yet now that we were seventeen the substance of time itself no longer seemed fluid but had assumed a gluelike consistency and churned around us like a yellow cream in a confectioner's machine.
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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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While Otto ran here and there, carefully choosing places to urinate, I felt over every inch of my body the scratches of sexual abandonment, the danger of drowning in scorn for myself and nostalgia for him. I got up and went back along the path; I whistled again, and waited for Otto to return.
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I cried and cried, as if I had carelessly lost somewhere the most promising part of myself.
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Lies are better than tranquilizers.
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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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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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Maybe there's no second time without a third, but there is a first time without a second.
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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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I tend toward an expansive sentence that has a cold surface and, visible underneath it, a magma of unbearable heat. I want readers to know from the first lines what they will have to deal with.
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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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Beautiful everywhere, outside and in, male fantasies.
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I don’t believe, however, that every fiction we orchestrate is good. I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions. I love unreal things when they show signs of firsthand knowledge of the terror, and hence an awareness that they are unreal, that they will not hold up for long against the collisions. Human beings are extremely violent animals, and the violence they are always ready to use in order to impose their own eternal, salvific life vest, while shattering those of others, is frightening.
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We were, in short, on the side of the violation, but only because it reaffirmed the value of the rule.
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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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Every one of her movements said that to harm her would be pointless because, whatever happened, she would find a way of doing worse to you.
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Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.