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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.
Elena Ferrante -
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.
Elena Ferrante
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That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelesness is what most frightened her.
Elena Ferrante -
When you haven’t been in the world long, it’s hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don’t even feel the need to.
Elena Ferrante -
We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.
Elena Ferrante -
The whole future---I thought---will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning.
Elena Ferrante -
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.
Elena Ferrante -
That he’s no one. And for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else.
Elena Ferrante
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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.
Elena Ferrante -
We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
Elena Ferrante -
When I returned home that night with the children, I felt the close, comfortable warmth of the apartment for the first time since the abandonmen.
Elena Ferrante -
Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
Elena Ferrante -
Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.
Elena Ferrante -
...but I was bored, I could scarcely understand them. I started to borrow novels from the circulating library, and read one after the other. But in the long run they didn't help. They presented intense lives, profound conversations, a phantom reality more appealing than my real life. So, in order to feel as if I were not real, I sometimes went...
Elena Ferrante
-
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.
Elena Ferrante -
In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. When those horrors release a violence that reaches into our cities and our habits we’re startled, we’re alarmed.
Elena Ferrante -
There is a poverty that makes us all cruel.
Elena Ferrante -
She was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being all her own, that was still obscure to her.
Elena Ferrante -
It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn't even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.
Elena Ferrante -
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.
Elena Ferrante
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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.
Elena Ferrante -
You can be hurt only if you love someone. But I don’t love anyone.
Elena Ferrante -
I was stunned. Fernando looked out, still screaming horrible threats at his daughter. He had thrown her like a thing.
Elena Ferrante -
We were, in short, on the side of the violation, but only because it reaffirmed the value of the rule.
Elena Ferrante