Elena Ferrante Quotes
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Success depends on the capacity to manipulate the obvious with calculated precision.
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Beautiful everywhere, outside and in, male fantasies.
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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.
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So pleasure was this: breaking, mixing, no longer knowing what was mine and what was his.
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You're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.
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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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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 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.
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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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Good feelings are fragile, with me love doesn’t last. Love for a man doesn’t last, not even love for a child, it soon gets a hole in it. You look in the hole and you see the nebula of good intentions mixed up with the nebula of bad.
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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.
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Words for being lost or for being found.
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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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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 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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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.
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I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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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...the dreams of the head ended up beneath the feet.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.