Elena Ferrante Quotes
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Everything is interesting if you know how to work on it.
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The fictional treatment of biographical material - a treatment that for me is essential - is full of traps.
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And to keep under control the anxieties of change I had, finally, taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm, my voice held back in my throat so that I would not make a spectacle of myself.
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Eliminating herself was a sort of aesthetic project. One can't go on anymore, she said, electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave traces of yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes.
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They had all known one another a long time, they knew they were complicit victims, and they had no doubt about who the whistleblower was: she, the only one who behaved from the start as if the need to work didn't go hand in hand with the need to be humiliated.
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He said we lived in a provincial country, where every occasion was an opportunity for complaining, but meanwhile no one rolled up his sleeves and reorganized things, trying to make them function.
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Don’t succumb. Fight. You are of today, take hold of today, don’t regress, don’t lose yourself, keep a tight grip. Above all, don’t give in to distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness.
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What did I care anymore about his political opinions, about Pasquale and Nadia, about the death of Ulrike Meinhof, the birth of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the electoral advances of the Communist Party? The world had retreated. I felt sunk inside myself, inside my flesh, which seemed to me not only the sole dwelling possible but also the only material for which it was worthwhile to struggle.
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I, too, would find out that old age is a brute, ferocious beast.
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Estrangement and belonging, an effect of distance and closeness at the same time.
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For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first.
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Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.
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To tolerate existence, we lie, and we lie above all to ourselves. Sometimes we tell ourselves lovely tales, sometimes petty lies. Falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reflection, they dilute the horrors of our time, they even save us from ourselves.
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Most of those who came were women, and I was now much criticized, now much praised by opposing groups. At first I was frightened, but Mariarosa interceded with authority and I discovered in myself an unsuspected capacity to summarize disagreement and agreement, choosing in the meantime a role as mediator. I was good at saying in a convincing way: That isn’t exactly what I meant.
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It’s relaxing, I thought, I was wrong not to come sooner. I had a friend of my age with her own house, full of opulent, orderly things.
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The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I waited in silence.
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You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.
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I am clean I am true I am playing with my cards on the table.
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Ah, the violence: tearing, killing, ripping. Lila, between fascination and horror, spoke to me in a mixture of dialect, Italian, and very educated quotations that she had taken from who knows where and remembered by heart. The entire planet, she said, is a big Fosso Carbonario.
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At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father’s shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer. They were all laughing, even Lila, with the expression of one who has a role and will play it to the utmost.
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But then, in Piazza di Carbonara, from stones she moved on to weapons, and it became the place where men fought to the last drop of blood. Beggars and gentlemen and princes hurried to see people killing each other in revenge. When some handsome youth fell, pierced by a blade beaten on the anvil of death, immediately beggars, bourgeois citizens, kings and queens offered applause that rose to the stars.
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I feel like the knight in an ancient romance as, wrapped in his shining armor, after performing a thousand astonishing feats throughout the world, he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdues and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage.
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I mean that a party can’t be anything other than a distributor of favors in exchange for support, ideals are part of the furniture.
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Don't be timid. You're a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present.