Elena Ferrante Quotes
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I seemed tranquil but I was extremely agitated, my face hurt with the effort of smiling.
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And there those who knew how to dance danced and those who didn’t learned.
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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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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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That even if we're constantly tempted to lower our guard -- out of love, or weariness, or sympathy, or kindness-- we women shouldn't do it. We can lose from one moment to the next everything that we have achieved.
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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.
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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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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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What have I done, she thought, dazed by wine, and what is this gold circle, this glittering zero I’ve stuck my finger in.
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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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We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.
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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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No one depended anymore on my care and, finally, even I was no longer a burden to myself.
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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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Individuals and cities without love are a danger to themselves and to others.
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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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You’re really a good girl, poor you.
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I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence.
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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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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 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 didn’t know the map of prestige.
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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.