Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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Males always have something pathetic about them, at every age. A fragile arrogance, a frightened audacity. I no longer know, today, if they ever aroused in me love or only an affectionate sympathy for their weaknesses.
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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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We had the same sensitivity to beautiful things, the same need to enjoy them, the same need to search for the right words to say how sweet the night was, how magical the moon, how the sea sparkled, how two souls were able to meet and recognize each other in the darkness, in the fragrant air.
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One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.
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In other words, the cultural education of any high-school student should include an introduction to the idea that a writer adapts his writing to ever-changing expressive needs and that a higher or lower note doesn't mean that the singer has changed.
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Oh of course it pleased me, it pleased me greatly. But I also felt as if my body had the consistency of egg shell, and a slight pressure on my arm, on my forehead, on my stomach would be enough to break it and dig out all my secrets, in particular those which were secrets even to me.
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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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Meanwhile, to consolidate a climate of benevolence, I tried to return to normal activities, like a sick person who has been in the hospital for a long time and, partly to overcome the fear of falling ill again, wants to reanchor himself to the life of the healthy.
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Both Pasquale and Rino turned out to be surprisingly good dancers, and we learned from them the tango, the waltz, the polka, and the mazurka.
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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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It seemed that everyone was shouting too loudly and moving too quickly. This sensation was accompanied by nausea, and she had had the impression that something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around everyone and everything forever, but imperceptible, was breaking down the outlines of persons and things and revealing itself.
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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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As for the minor characters, it seemed natural for each of them to have his good or bad moment in the life of the protagonists and then slip into the background, just as when we think back on our existence and, of the many people who entered the flow of our lives, remember almost nothing.
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I felt squeezed in that vise along with the mass of everyday things and people, and I had a bad taste in my mouth, a permanent sense of nausea that exhausted me, as if everything, thus compacted, and always tighter, were grinding me up, reducing me to a repulsive cream.
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... my mother, before she became my mother, was followed by the man with whom she would make love, who would cover her with his name, who would annihilate her with his alphabet.
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The blood spurted from his neck and hit a copper pot hanging on the wall.
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Books are written so their authors can be heard, not so that they remain silent.
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The laws work for those who fear them, not for those who violate them.
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I’ve never been in analysis. But it’s rare that one saves oneself from a rickety landing at the top of a building by throwing oneself down the stairwell.
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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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The whole future---I thought---will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning.
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Then I felt as if my thoughts were cut off in the middle, absorbing and yet defective, with an urgent need for verification, for development, yet without conviction, without faith in themselves.
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She spoke with a different sort of determination, calmer, as if it were no longer necessary to fight to the death for every little thing.