Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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For children parents are always a burden. But parents who draw too much attention to themselves are intolerable.
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The depressed don’t write books. People who are happy write, people who travel, are in love, and talk and talk with the conviction that, one way or another, their words always go to the right place.
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At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.
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I said to myself every day: I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured.
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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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To be healthy, and desperate to be a Natasha at the ball with Prince Andrei or Kuryagin, and instead to be sitting alone, staring at the ceiling, while listening to the echo of the music, the sound of voices, the laughter.
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We grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.
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As long as one writes only for oneself, writing is a free act by means of which, to use an oxymoron, one secretly opens oneself.
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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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Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.
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I couldn’t calm down. Was it possible that Mario should leave me like this, without warning? It seemed to me incredible that all of a sudden he had become uninterested in my life, like a plant watered for years that is abruptly allowed to die of drought. I couldn’t conceive that he had unilaterally decided that he no longer owed me any attention.
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I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts.
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We are tornadoes that pick up fragments with the most varied historical and biological origins. This makes of us -- thankfully -- fickle agglomerations that maintain a fragile equilibrium, that are inconsistent and complex, that can't be reduced to any fixed framework that does not inevitably leave out a great deal. Which is why the more effective stories resemble ramparts from which one can gaze out at everything that has been excluded.
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That last phrase, the elegant jump from malicious gossip to compliment, seemed to me so very successful that I thought of adult normality precisely as an art of that type. I had something to learn.
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What’s got into me? Do I want children? Do I want to be a mamma, nursing and singing lullabies? Marriage plus pregnancy? And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I’m safe?
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I now knew a method of speaking and writing that—by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn’t supposed to fail—sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object.
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There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.
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Today I know what I felt, but then I didn't understand. At that instant I had only an unpleasant impression, as if he had given the signal and from then on all I could do was to sink by degrees into repugnance. In reality I felt above all a blaze of hatred toward myself, because I was there, because I had no excuses, because it was I who had decided to come, because it seemed to me that I could not retreat.
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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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It was a good rule not to expect the ideal but to enjoy what is possible.
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I’ll give you treasure chests full of gold pieces, I know the value of spending time with you.
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I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new.
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When I returned home that night with the children, I felt the close, comfortable warmth of the apartment for the first time since the abandonment.