Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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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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We grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.
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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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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.
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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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It was a good rule not to expect the ideal but to enjoy what is possible.
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The laws work for those who fear them, not for those who violate them.
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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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Religion will disappear from men's consciousness when, finally, we have constructed a world of equals, without class distinctions, and with a sound of scientific conception of society and of life.
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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 understood that I had arrived there full of pride and realized that—in good faith, certainly, with affection—I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.
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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 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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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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In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.
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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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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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What seemed to interest and absorb her most was that all that filth, all that chaos of broken limbs and dug-out eyes and split heads was then covered—literally covered—by a church dedicated to San Giovanni Battista and by a monastery of Augustinian hermits who had a valuable library. Ah, ah—she laughed—underneath there’s blood and above, God, peace, prayer, and books.
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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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The blood spurted from his neck and hit a copper pot hanging on the wall.
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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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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.