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Why, then, even when I advanced, was I so quick to retreat? Why did I always have ready a gracious smile, a happy laugh, when things went badly? Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?
Elena Ferrante -
Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. I did so then, and finally it seemed that I had only come up against yet another proof of how splendid and shadowy our friendship was, how long and complicated Lila’s suffering had been, how it still endured and would endure forever.
Elena Ferrante
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Words rarely go to the right place, and if they do, it’s only for a very brief time.
Elena Ferrante -
My entire life would be reduced merely to a petty battle to change my social class.
Elena Ferrante -
I had long since realized that each of us organizes memory as it suits him, I'm still surprised when I do it myself. But it surprised me that one could go so far as to give the facts an arrangement that went against one's own interests.
Elena Ferrante -
I felt that in me fear could not put down roots, and even the lava, the fiery stream of melting matter that I imagined inside the earthly globe, and the fear it provoked in me, settled in my mind in orderly sentences, in harmonious images, became a pavement of black stones like the streets of Naples, a pavement where I was always and no matter what the center.
Elena Ferrante -
It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me: the fear that, in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance. And the fact that she didn’t answer emphasized that preoccupation. However hard I tried in my letters to communicate the privilege of the days in Ischia, my river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full.
Elena Ferrante -
On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins, The term isn't mine, she always used it. She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared. That night, on the terrace where we were celebrating the arrival of 1959, when she was abruptly struck by that sensation, she was frightened and kept it to herself, still unable to name it. It was only years later, one night in November 1980--we were thirty-six, were married, had children--that she recounted in detail what had happened to her then, what still sometimes happened to her, and she used that term for the first time.
Elena Ferrante
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He had rid himself so fiercely of memory, language, the capacity to find meaning that it seemed obvious the hatred he had for himself, for his own skin, for his moods, for his thoughts and words, for the brutal corner of the world that had enveloped him.
Elena Ferrante -
The better and truer you feel, the farther away you go.
Elena Ferrante -
And no one knew better than I did what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men; I had done it, I was doing it.
Elena Ferrante -
That year it seemed to me that I expanded like pizza dough.
Elena Ferrante -
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.
Elena Ferrante -
She expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but – further – she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, the confusion of the oral.
Elena Ferrante
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That the human condition was so obviously exposed to the blind fury of chance that to trust in a God, a Jesus, the Holy Spirit—this last a completely superfluous entity, it was there only to make up a trinity, notoriously nobler than the mere binomial father-son—was the same thing as collecting trading cards while the city burns in the fires of hell.
Elena Ferrante -
I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful.
Elena Ferrante -
You still waste time with those things, Lenù? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on lava. On that part we construct buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Elena Ferrante -
A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties.
Elena Ferrante -
Saw the rings that I had left upon waking on the edge of the sink and I put on my finger the one with the aquamarine, while, without hesitation, I let the wedding ring fall down the drain.
Elena Ferrante -
I was afraid that she would express herself in dialect, that she would say something vulgar, that it would become obvious that school for her had ended with an elementary-school diploma. I was afraid that, if she merely opened her mouth, everyone would be hypnotized by her intelligence and Professor Galiani herself would be entranced. I was afraid that the professor would find her both presumptuous and naïve and would say to me: Who is this friend of yours, stop seeing her. I was afraid she would understand that I was only Lila’s pale shadow and would be interested not in me any longer but in her, she would want to see her again, she would undertake to make her go back to school.
Elena Ferrante
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This is what awaits me, I thought. Evenings like this. Appearing at the house of strangers, marked as a woman waiting to remake her life.
Elena Ferrante -
We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.
Elena Ferrante -
But not even then did I lose my composure. I continued to proceed with circumspection, as I always had before the accidents of life. The only external sign of my agitation was an inclination to disorder and a weakness in my fingers, and, the more the anguish increased, the harder they found it to close solidly around things.
Elena Ferrante -
Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.
Elena Ferrante