Elena Ferrante Quotes
-
Beautiful everywhere, outside and in, male fantasies.
-
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.
-
Books are written so their authors can be heard, not so that they remain silent.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It's hard to explain why, but that regret made me suffer. It seemed to be the sign of a true interest in Lila, something much stronger than the compliments for my discipline as a constant reader. It occurred to me that if Lila had taken out just a single book a year, on that book she would have left her imprint and the teacher would have felt it the moment she returned it, which I left no mark, I embodied only the persistence with which I added volume to volume in no particular order.
-
Don’t be timid. You’re a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present. And begin with the scum in your area, put their backs to the wall.
-
If she kept him next to her she was afraid of breaking him, if she pushed him too far away she was afraid of losing him.
-
Maybe there's no second time without a third, but there is a first time without a second.
-
Then he added, in an almost threatening tone: Without these rasping hands, professor, not a chair would exist, or a building, a car, nothing, not even you; if we workers stopped working everything would stop, the sky would fall to earth and the earth would shoot up the sky, the plants would take over the cities, the Arno would flood your fine houses, and only those who have always worked would know how to survive, and as for you two, you with all your books, the dogs would tear you to pieces.
-
I’ve known how to whistle since I was five years old.
-
Only when we feel the story in each of its moments or places are we able to tell it properly.
-
Words for being lost or for being found.
-
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.
-
I had to accept myself outside of her.
-
Success depends on the capacity to manipulate the obvious with calculated precision.
-
The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.
-
Every one of her movements said that to harm her would be pointless because, whatever happened, she would find a way of doing worse to you.
-
I'm lying, yes, but why do you force me to give a linear explanation; linear explanations are almost always lies.
-
To write, you have to want something to survive you. I don’t even have the desire to live, I’ve never had it strongly the way you have. If I could eliminate myself now, while we’re speaking, I’d be more than happy. Imagine if I’m going to start writing.
-
She spoke with a different sort of determination, calmer, as if it were no longer necessary to fight to the death for every little thing.
-
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.
-
So pleasure was this: breaking, mixing, no longer knowing what was mine and what was his.
-
I seemed tranquil but I was extremely agitated, my face hurt with the effort of smiling.