Elena Ferrante Quotes
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You know how children are, sometimes they love you by cuddling you, other times by trying to remake you from the start, reinvent you, as if they thought you were badly brought up and they had to teach you how to get on in the world, what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to see, the words you should use and those you shouldn’t because they’re old now, no one says that anymore.
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.
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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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But her husband was sleeping, he had fallen asleep as if wrapped in a magic cape.
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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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You’re really a good girl, poor you.
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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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And there those who knew how to dance danced and those who didn’t learned.
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Maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset.
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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.
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Realized that on his lips was a mute laugh that I had never seen before. It became him, the expression of a sympathetic man who wishes to show that he knows what’s what.
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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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I seemed tranquil but I was extremely agitated, my face hurt with the effort of smiling.
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Individuals and cities without love are a danger to themselves and to others.
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Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence.
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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 knew - perhaps I hoped - that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again.
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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.