Elena Ferrante Quotes
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The conclusion we drew from this convinced us that it was best to do everything on purpose, deliberately, so that you would know what to expect.
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I had to accept myself outside of her.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Maybe there's no second time without a third, but there is a first time without a second.
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Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.
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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.
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I’ve known how to whistle since I was five years old.
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I seemed tranquil but I was extremely agitated, my face hurt with the effort of smiling.
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I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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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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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Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence.
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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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The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.
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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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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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But her husband was sleeping, he had fallen asleep as if wrapped in a magic cape.
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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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Maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset.
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I had the impression that, although I was absorbing much of that sight, many things, too many, were scattering around me without letting me grasp them.