Elena Ferrante Quotes
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You can be hurt only if you love someone. But I don’t love anyone.
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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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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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I had to accept myself outside of her.
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No one depended anymore on my care and, finally, even I was no longer a burden to myself.
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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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Then she added a sentence I will always remember: “the beauty of mind Cerullo had from childhood never found an outlet, Greco, it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and will be as if she never had it.
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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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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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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.
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I began to weep with loneliness. What was I, who was I? I felt pretty again, my pimples were gone, the sun and the sea had made me slimmer, and yet the person I liked and whom I wished to be liked by showed no interest in me.
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Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.
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I don't have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.
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The university doesn’t free women but completes their repression.
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So pleasure was this: breaking, mixing, no longer knowing what was mine and what was his.
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We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.
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I was stunned. Fernando looked out, still screaming horrible threats at his daughter. He had thrown her like a thing.
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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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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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Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.
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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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You’re really a good girl, poor you.
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Books are written so their authors can be heard, not so that they remain silent.
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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.