Elena Ferrante Quotes
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We gazed at the constellations, praising the portentous architecture of the sky with trite formulas.
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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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How quickly people changed, with their interests, their feelings. Well-made phrases replaced by well-made phrases, time is a flow of words coherent only in appearance, the one who piles up the most is the one who wins.
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A language is a compendium of the history, geography, material and spiritual life, the vices and virtues, not only of those who speak it, but also of those who have spoken it through the centuries. The words, the grammar, the syntax are a chisel that shapes our thought.
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No, to produce ideas you don't have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.
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The angel of death, she said proudly, touched me when I was a child, with the exact same illness as now, but I screwed him, even though I was just a girl. And you'll see, I'll screw him again, because I know how to suffer. I learned at the age of ten, I haven't stopped since. And if you know how to suffer, the angel respects you, after a while he goes away. As she spoke she pulled up her dress and showed me the injured leg like the relic of an old battle. She smacked it, observing me with a fixed half-smile on her lips and terrified eyes.
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Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it.
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Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school? Or had she brought me back in such a hurry so that I would avoid punishment? Or - I wonder today - did she want at different moments both things?
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Every choice has its history, so many moments of our existence are shoved into a corner, waiting for an outlet, and in the end the outlet arrives.
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Yes, I was stupid. The channels of my senses were blocked, how long had it been since life flowed in them. What a mistake it had been to close off the meaning of my existence in the rites that Mario offered with cautious conjugal rapture. What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life. What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him.
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The laws work for those who fear them, not for those who violate them.
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I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me.
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When the task we give ourselves has the urgency of passion, there's nothing that can keep us from completing it.
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She kept repeating that if she had dedicated herself assiduously to every child in the neighborhood, in a generation everything would change, there would no longer be the smart and the incompetent, the good and the bad. Then she looked at her son and again burst out crying.
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She was like that, she threw things off balance just to see if she could put them back in some other way.
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She became transparent skin over bones, her eyes drowning in violet wells, her hands damp spider webs.
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Lila was happy, and she was drawing me deeper and deeper into her fierce happiness, because she had suddenly found, perhaps without even realizing it, an opportunity that allowed her to portray the fury she directed against herself, the insurgence, perhaps for the first time in her life, of the need - and here the verb used by Michele was appropriate - to erase herself.
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I wasn't capable of entrusting myself to true feelings. I didn't know how to be drawn beyond limits. I didn't possess that emotional power that had driven Lila to do all she could to enjoy that day and that night. I stayed behind, waiting. She, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn't afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings. She deserved Nino, in other words, because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not hope that he would want her.
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In fiction we say and recognize things about ourselves, which, for the sake of propriety, we ignore or don't talk about in reality.
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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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If I could conceal from myself the impression that the life had been drained out of me like blood and saliva and mucus from a patient during an operation, maybe I could deceive Mario as well.
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I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
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Good feelings are fragile, with me love doesn’t last. Love for a man doesn’t last, not even love for a child, it soon gets a hole in it. You look in the hole and you see the nebula of good intentions mixed up with the nebula of bad.
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The furies who indulge the happiness of today to feed the violence of tomorrow.