Elena Ferrante Quotes
-
And yet now that we were seventeen the substance of time itself no longer seemed fluid but had assumed a gluelike consistency and churned around us like a yellow cream in a confectioner's machine.
-
Every footfall, every voice was Don Achille creeping up behind us or coming down toward us with a long knife, the kind used for slicing open a chicken breast. There was an odor of sautéing garlic. Maria, Don Achille’s wife, would put me in the pan of boiling oil, the children would eat me, he would suck my head the way my father did with mullets.
-
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.
-
What have I done, she thought, dazed by wine, and what is this gold circle, this glittering zero I’ve stuck my finger in.
-
We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
-
Maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset.
-
Individuals and cities without love are a danger to themselves and to others.
-
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.
-
There is a poverty that makes us all cruel.
-
That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelesness is what most frightened her.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
-
But the happy ending has to do with the tricks of the narrative, not with life, or even love, which is an uncontrollable, changeable feeling, with nasty surprises that are alien to the happy ending.
-
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.
-
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.
-
We were, in short, on the side of the violation, but only because it reaffirmed the value of the rule.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.