Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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When you haven’t been in the world long, it’s hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don’t even feel the need to.
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Beautiful everywhere, outside and in, male fantasies.
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I didn't hear what he said, but I felt like laughing at his artificial imperiousness. The laugh took away every desire to attack, drained me... React. I began to tidy up. When I had finished I began again, a kind of roundup of everything that didn't appear to be in order. Lucidity, determination, hold on to life.
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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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Both Pasquale and Rino turned out to be surprisingly good dancers, and we learned from them the tango, the waltz, the polka, and the mazurka.
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And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I’m safe?
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I wrote my book to free myself from it, not to be its prisoner.
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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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There are people who leave and people who know how to be left.
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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 abandonmen.
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Only she can say if, in fact, she has managed to insert herself into this extremely long chain of words to modify my text, to purposely supply the missing links, to unhook others without letting it show, to say of me more than I want, more than I’m able to say.
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But I’ve always had a low voice, I can’t yell, the words fall a short distance away like a handful of pebbles thrown by a child.
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Success depends on the capacity to manipulate the obvious with calculated precision.
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The attentions of Pasquale Peluso consoled me greatly, I liked that he made me laugh. Maybe I’m not so ugly, I thought, maybe I can’t see myself.
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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.
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I had always considered sex an ultimate sticky reality, the least mediated contact possible with another body. Instead, after that experience, I was convinced that sex is an extreme product of the imagination. The greater the pleasure, the more the other is only a dream, a nocturnal reaction of belly, breasts, mouth, anus―of every isolated inch of skin―to the caresses and thrusts of a vague entity definable according to the necessities of the moment.
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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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She was like the full moon when it crouches behind the forest and the branches scribble on its face.
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When I gave signs of protest she nearly reminded me of the money she was giving me. She stopped in time, but not so that I didn't understand: it was like when someone is about to hit you and then doesn't.
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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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You can’t leave me here to hope, when in reality you’ve already decided everything.
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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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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.