Elena Ferrante Quotes
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I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet of my mind. I can’t stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, break.
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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.
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A woman's body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect's poison injected into a vein.
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My entire life would be reduced merely to a petty battle to change my social class.
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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.
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Starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.
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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.
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I gave in continuously, with painful pleasure, to waves of unhappiness.
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I had less success in the courtyard. There only love and boyfriends counted.
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Someone who takes love away from us devastates the cultural structure we've worked on all our lives, deprives us of that sort of Eden that until that moment had made us appear innocent and lovable. Human beings give the worst of themselves when their cultural clothes are torn off, and they find themselves facing the nakedness of their bodies, they feel the shame of them. In a certain sense the loss of love is the common experience closest to the myth of the expulsion from the earthly paradise: it's the violent end of the illusion of having a heavenly body, it's the discovery of one's own dispensability and perishability.
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I pretended to be interested in their secret undertaking, but in fact I was very sorry about it. Although the two siblings had involved me by choosing me as their confidant, it was still an experience that I could enter only as witness: on that path Lila would do great things by herself, I was excluded. But above all, how, after our intense conversations about love and poetry, could she walk me to the door, as she was doing, far more absorbed in the atmosphere of excitement around a shoe?...What did I care about shoes. I still had, in my mind's eye, the most secret stages of that affair of violated trust, passion, poetry that became a book, and it was as if she and I had read a novel together, as if we had seen, there in the back of the shop and not in the parish hall on Sunday, a dramatic film.
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Such persistence in memorizing fashionable jargon, wasted effort. I had been conditioned by my education, which had shaped my mind, my voice.
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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.
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The most difficult achievement is the capacity to see oneself, to name oneself, to imagine oneself. If in daily life we use ideologies, common sense, religion, even literature itself to disguise our experiences and make them presentable, in fiction it’s possible to sweep away all the veils—in fact, perhaps, it’s a duty.
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Don’t get angry, she said, try to reflect: what does a woman of your understanding feel at the idea that her happiness becomes the ruin of someone else?
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The ‘right reading’ is an invention of academics and critics. Every reader gets from the book he is reading nothing else but his book. The shelves where we line up the volumes we’ve read are deceptive. We have available there only titles, covers, pages. But the books we’ve truly read are phantoms conjured up by reading with no rules.
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The frantumaglia is an unstable landscape, an infinite aerial or aquatic mass of debris that appears to the I, brutally, as its true and unique inner self. The frantumaglia is the storehouse of time without the orderliness of a history, a story. The frantumaglia is an effect of the sense of loss, when we’re sure that everything that seems to us stable, lasting, an anchor for our life, will soon join that landscape of debris that we seem to see. The frantumaglia is to perceive with excruciating anguish the heterogeneous crowd from which we, living, raise our voice, and the heterogeneous crowd into which it is fated to vanish.
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Especially at night she was afraid of waking up and finding him formless in the bed, transformed into excrescences that burst out because of too much fluid, the flesh melted and dripping, and with it everything around, the furniture, the entire apartment and she herself, his wife, broken, sucked into that stream polluted by living matter.
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I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.
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At those moments I saw myself suddenly for what I was: a slave, willing to always do what he wanted, careful not to exaggerate in order not to get him in trouble, not to displease him. I wasted my time cooking for him, washing the dirty clothes he left in the house, listening to all his troubles at the university and in the many responsibilities that he was accumulating, thanks to the aura of good feeling that surrounded him and the small powers of his father-in-law; I always welcomed him joyfully, I wanted him to be happier with me than in the other house, I wanted him to relax, to confide, I felt sorry that he was continuously overwhelmed by obligations; I even wondered if Eleonora might love him more than I did, since she accepted every insult just to feel that he was still hers. But sometimes I couldn’t stand it anymore and I yelled at him, despite the risk that the girls might hear: Who am I for you, tell me why I’m in this city, why I wait for you every night, why I tolerate this situation.
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My daughter would soon be the age of the ghosts of our girlhood. I found it inconceivable that in a relatively small amount of time, my daughter could wear a wedding dress, as Lila had, end up brutalized in a man's bed, lock herself in the role of Signora Carracci; I found it equally inconceivable that, as had happened to me, she could lie under the heavy body of a grown man, at night, on the Maronti, smeared with dark sand, damp air, and bodily fluids, just for revenge. I remembered the thousands of odious things we had gone through and I let the solidarity regain force. What a waste it would be, I said to myself, to ruin our story by leaving too much space for ill feelings: ill feelings are inevitable, but the essential thing is to keep them in check.
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Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity.
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Was it possible that I—short, too full-figured, wearing glasses, I diligent but not intelligent, I who pretended to be cultured, informed, when I wasn’t—could have believed that he would like me even just for the length of a vacation?
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I’m laughing, I apologized, at the situation, at you, who’ve wanted to kill Nino forever, and at me, who if he showed up now would say to you: Yes, kill him. I’m laughing out of despair, because I’ve never been so offended, because I feel humiliated in a way that I don’t know if you can imagine, because at this moment I’m so ill that I think I’m fainting.