Elena Ferrante Quotes
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Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.
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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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Had it really been so wonderful? I knew very well that at that time, too, there had been shame. And uneasiness, and humiliation, and disgust: accept, submit, force yourself. Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
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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 was stunned. Fernando looked out, still screaming horrible threats at his daughter. He had thrown her like a thing.
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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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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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And there those who knew how to dance danced and those who didn’t learned.
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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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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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Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence.
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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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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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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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That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelesness is what most frightened her.
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You’re really a good girl, poor you.
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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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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.
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We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.
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Individuals and cities without love are a danger to themselves and to others.
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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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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.