Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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.
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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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People died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse, and yet, in every round of voting, gave their enthusiastic approval to the politicians who made their life unbearable.
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At first I had great expectations, and even if I didn’t say so clearly to myself I was glad to be there with Gigliola Spagnuolo rather than with Lila. In some very secret part of myself I looked forward to a school where she would never enter, where, in her absence, I would be the best student, and which I would sometimes tell her about, boasting. But immediately I began to falter, many of the others proved to be better than me. I ended up with Gigliola in a kind.
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Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.
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I still remember him fondly, there in the doorway. He was absolutely the first person to show me how comfortable it is to arrive in a strange, potentially hostile environment, and discover that you have been preceded by your reputation, that you don't have to do anything to be accepted, that your name is known, that everyone knows about you, and it's the others, the strangers, who must strive to win your favor, and not you theirs.
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The university doesn’t free women but completes their repression.
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I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart, the same that had burst out of my chest in that distant moment when Lila had proposed that we write a story together. It had fallen to me to do it seriously. But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts, which no one would ever do better than me, not even Lila if she had had the opportunity?
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It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.
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After that he began to talk excitedly about the plays of Beckett: Ah, how he liked those guys buried in the ground up to their necks; and how beautiful the statement was about the fire that the present kindles inside you; and, even though among the thousand evocative things that Maddy and Dan Rooney said he had had a hard time picking out the precise point cited by Lila, well, the concept that life is felt more when you are blind, deaf, mute, and maybe without taste or touch was objectively interesting in itself.
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The furies who indulge the happiness of today to feed the violence of tomorrow.
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We gazed at the constellations, praising the portentous architecture of the sky with trite formulas.
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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.
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It wasn't my mother's laugh, the obscene laughter of a woman who knows. In Nella there was something chaste and yet vulgar, it was the laugh of an aging virgin that asailed me and pushed me to laugh, too, but in a forced way. I saw myself growing old, with that laugh of malicious innocence in my breast. I thought: I'll end up laughing like that, too.
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It was as if I had been strolling absentmindedly and banged into a door.
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All the more reason, then, to wonder why I had confessed what was so much my own to strangers, people very different from me, who would therefore never be able to understand my reasons, and who surely, at that moment, were speaking ill of me. I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t forgive myself, I felt I had been flushed out.
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Perhaps the idea of money as a cement to solidify our existence and prevent it from dissolving, together with the people who were dear to us, endured.
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How difficult it is to find one's way , how difficult it is not to violate any of the incredibly detailed male regulations.
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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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Even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina.
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In the most absolute tranquility or in the midst of tumultuous events, in safety or danger, in innocence or corruption, we are a crowd of others. And this crowd is certainly a blessing for literature.
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Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before 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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For children parents are always a burden. But parents who draw too much attention to themselves are intolerable.
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I hated the idea that he knew everything about me while I knew little or nothing of him. I felt like someone who is blind and knows that he is being observed by the very people he would like to spy on in every detail.