Elena Ferrante Quotes
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Words for being lost or for being found.
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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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She claimed that she was in the service of the workers, and yet, from her room in a house full of books and with a view of the sea, she wanted to command you, she wanted to tell you what you should do with your work, she decided for you, she had the solution ready even if you ended up in the street.
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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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But her husband was sleeping, he had fallen asleep as if wrapped in a magic cape.
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Depressed I went out into the heat that lay on the neighborhood like a hand swollen with fever in that season, and made my way to the library.
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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.
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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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Meanwhile, to consolidate a climate of benevolence, I tried to return to normal activities, like a sick person who has been in the hospital for a long time and, partly to overcome the fear of falling ill again, wants to reanchor himself to the life of the healthy.
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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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You’re really a good girl, poor you.
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Maybe the wealth we wanted as children is this, I thought: not strongboxes full of diamonds and gold coins but a bathtub, to immerse yourself like this every day, to eat bread, salami, prosciutto, to have a lot of space even in the bathroom, to have a telephone, a pantry and icebox full of food, a photograph in a silver frame on the sideboard that shows you in your wedding dress—to have this entire house, with the kitchen, the bedroom, the dining room, the two balconies, and the little room where I am studying, and where, even though Lila hasn’t said so, soon, when it comes, a baby will sleep.
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We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us.
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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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How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they're at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function. To say : I am your history, you begin from me, listen to me, it could be useful to you.
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I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story yet in fact are nothing, nothing of mine, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion, only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even she who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.
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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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I would have the small happinesses of the unmarried girl in glasses who spends her life studying: a walk, being taken by the hand.
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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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... my mother, before she became my mother, was followed by the man with whom she would make love, who would cover her with his name, who would annihilate her with his alphabet.
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The girl, perhaps without even realizing it, and who knows for how long, had been assessing the power of her swaying body, her restless eyes, on my husband; and he looked at her as one looks from a gray area at a white wall struck by the sun.
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Watch me until I fall asleep. Watch me always even when you leave Naples. That way I'll know that you see me and I'm at peace.
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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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Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote. I remember the dialect on my mother's lips when she lost that gentle cadence and yelled at us, poisoned by her unhappiness: I can't take you anymore, I can't take any more. Commands, shouts, insults, life stretching into her words, as when a frayed nerve is just touched, and the pain scrapes away all self-control.