Elena Ferrante Quotes
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...the dreams of the head ended up beneath the feet.
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Women, in all fields - whether mothers or not - still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections.
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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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And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I’m safe?
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Finally, I spoke of the necessity of recounting frankly every human experience, including, I said emphatically, what seems unsayable and what we do not speak of even to ourselves.
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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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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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Success depends on the capacity to manipulate the obvious with calculated precision.
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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.
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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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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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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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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 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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I'm lying, yes, but why do you force me to give a linear explanation; linear explanations are almost always lies.
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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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I had to accept myself outside of her.
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We were twelve years old, but we walked along the hot streets of the neighborhood, amid the dust and flies that the occasional old trucks stirred up as they passed, like two old ladies taking the measure of lives of disappointment, clinging tightly to each other. No one understood us, only we two—I thought—understood one another.
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In his view love ended only when it was possible to return to oneself without fear or disgust.
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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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They were just like the relations from whom I had fled as a girl. I couldn’t bear them and yet they held me tight, I had them all inside me.
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It seemed to me that I had mastered words to the point of sweeping away forever the contradictions of being in the world, the surge of emotions, and breathless speech. In short, I now knew a method of speaking and writing that—by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn’t supposed to fail—sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object.
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Get out of your mind that you can be a woman like me, all you’d succeed in being is what a woman is according to you men. You can copy me, make a portrait as precise as an artist, but my shit will always remain mine, and yours will be yours.
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She felt that the years she had dedicated to him had been in vain.