Elena Ferrante Quotes
-
And so, in spite of his virtues, he was a frivolous, superficial man, an animal organism who dripped sweat and fluids and left behind, like the residue of a careless pleasure, living material conceived, nourished, shaped within female bellies.
-
So pleasure was this: breaking, mixing, no longer knowing what was mine and what was his.
-
Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories...The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I am therefore Italian, completely and with pride. But if I could, I would descend into all languages and let myself be permeated by them all. Even the terrible Google Translate consoles me. We can be much more than what we happen to be.
-
There are people who leave and people who know how to be left.
-
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.
-
In order not to cut out a large part of one's private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.
-
That even if we're constantly tempted to lower our guard -- out of love, or weariness, or sympathy, or kindness-- we women shouldn't do it. We can lose from one moment to the next everything that we have achieved.
-
Success depends on the capacity to manipulate the obvious with calculated precision.
-
Lies are better than tranquilizers.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
I cried and cried, as if I had carelessly lost somewhere the most promising part of myself.
-
Thus the story of the facts has to reckon with filters, deferments, partial truths, half lies: from it comes an arduous measurement of time passed that is based completely on the unreliable measuring device of words.
-
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.
-
Others haven’t had the same luck. In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. When those horrors release a violence that reaches into our cities and our habits we’re startled, we’re alarmed.
-
We told each other everything, even the little things, and were happy.
-
Because what is the face, what finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise, rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature.
-
Only when we feel the story in each of its moments or places are we able to tell it properly.
-
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.
-
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.