Elena Ferrante Quotes
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Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life.
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We are flying over a ball of fire.
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He didn't want her the way he generally wanted women, to feel them under him, to turn them over, turn them again, open them up, break them, step on them, and crush them. He didn't want her in order to have sex and then forget her. He wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last.
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Why would anyone be interested in my little personal story if we can do without Homer's or Shakespeare's? Someone who truly loves literature is like a person of faith. The believer knows very well that there is nothing at all at the bureau of vital statistics about the Jesus that truly counts for him.
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When there’s too much silence, she said, so many ideas come to mind, I don’t pay attention. Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause, there are the likable ones and the unlikable, the good and the bad, everything in the end consoles.
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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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A broken clock that, because its metal heart continued to beat, was now breaking the time of everything else.
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There are people who leave and people who know how to be left.
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...the dreams of the head ended up beneath the feet.
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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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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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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’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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Reading and writing are closed-room activities, which literally take you away from the gaze of others. The greater risk is that they also remove others from your gaze.
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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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Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.
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His wealth, his upbringing, his reputation, well known among the students, as a young militant on the left, his sociability, even his courage when he delivered carefully measured speeches against powerful people within and outside the university—all this had given him an aura that automatically extended to me, as his fiancée or girlfriend or companion, as if the pure and simple fact that he loved me were the public sanctioning of my talents.
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Soon she’ll start yelling, I thought, soon she’ll hit her, trying to break that bond. Instead, the bond will become more twisted, will strengthen in remorse, in the humiliation of having shown herself in public to be an unaffectionate mother, not the mother of church or the Sunday supplements.
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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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Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive.
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I wrote my book to free myself from it, not to be its prisoner.
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The problem is that real change takes a long time, while life hits us right away, now, with all its contradictions.
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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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In conversations with my daughters I hear omitted words or phrases. Sometimes they get mad, they say Mama, I never said that, you’re saying it, you invented it. But I invent nothing; you just have to listen—the unspoken says more than the spoken.