Top 100 Elena Ferrante Quotes
#1. Finally, I spoke of the necessity of recounting frankly every human experience, including, I said emphatically, what seems unsayable and what we do not speak of even to ourselves.
Elena Ferrante
#2. I had less success in the courtyard. There only love and boyfriends counted.
Elena Ferrante
#3. In order not to cut out a large part of one's private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.
Elena Ferrante
#4. My river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full
Elena Ferrante
#5. Earthquake - the earthquake of November 23, 1980, with its infinite destruction - entered into our bones. It expelled the habit of stability and solidity, the confidence that every second would be identical to the next, the familiarity of
Elena Ferrante
#6. I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.
Elena Ferrante
#7. How heavy a body that has been traversed by death is, life is light, there's no need to let anyone make it heavy for us
Elena Ferrante
#8. Rino's mother is named Raffaella Cerullo, but everyone has always called her Lina. Not me, I've never used either her first name or her last. To me, for more than sixty years, she's been Lila. If I were to call her Lina or Raffaella, suddenly, like that, she would think our friendship was over.
Elena Ferrante
#9. I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
Elena Ferrante
#10. Places of the imagination are visited in books. Seen in reality they may be hard to recognize; they are disappointing, they might even seem fake.
Elena Ferrante
#11. There are people who leave and people who know how to be left.
Elena Ferrante
#12. Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense
Elena Ferrante
#13. Useless labor, that I feared would stay in my mind, extending into me, into everything. On the occasion of both funerals I made plans ahead of time to visit Pasquale. In those years I did that whenever I could. In prison he had studied a lot, had received his high school diploma, and, recently, a
Elena Ferrante
#14. The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.
Elena Ferrante
#15. I know I'm mean to tell you these things, but he is much worse than I am. He has the worst kind of meanness, that of superficiality.
Elena Ferrante
#16. It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn't even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.
Elena Ferrante
#17. I thought: yes, Lila is right, the beauty of things is a trick, the sky is the throne of fear; I'm alive, now, here, ten steps from the water, and it is not beautiful, it's terrifying; along with this beach, the sea, the swarm of animal forms, I am part of the universal terror.
Elena Ferrante
#18. Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.
Elena Ferrante
#19. They were just like the relations from whom I had fled as a girl. I couldn't bear them and yet they held me tight, I had them all inside me.
Elena Ferrante
#20. The laws work for those who fear them, not for those who violate them.
Elena Ferrante
#21. Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.
Elena Ferrante
#22. 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.
Elena Ferrante
#23. My work stops at publication. If the books don't contain in themselves their reasons for being - questions and answers - it means I was wrong to have them published.
Elena Ferrante
#24. You can't leave me here to hope, when in reality you've already decided everything.
Elena Ferrante
#25. It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.
Elena Ferrante
#26. I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness.
Elena Ferrante
#28. Reading and writing are closed-room activities, which literally take you away from the gaze of others. The greater risk is that they also remove others from your gaze.
Elena Ferrante
#31. As a girl-twelve, thirteen years old-I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me.
Elena Ferrante
#32. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women's intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn't realize it. I
Elena Ferrante
#33. She was like that, she threw things off balance just to see if she could put them back in some other way.
Elena Ferrante
#34. 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.
Elena Ferrante
#35. Individuals and cities without love are a danger to themselves and to others.
Elena Ferrante
#36. How can I explain to this woman - I thought - that from the age of six I've been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?
Elena Ferrante
#37. I had the impression that, although I was absorbing much of that sight, many things, too many, were scattering around me without letting me grasp them.
Elena Ferrante
#38. That year it seemed to me that I expanded like pizza dough.
Elena Ferrante
#39. I don't want to accept an idea of life where the success of the self is measured by the success of the written page.
Elena Ferrante
#40. Who says I'm vain?" "The comparison: your friend isn't. But I'm sorry for her, vanity is a resource. If you're vain you pay attention to yourself and your affairs.
Elena Ferrante
#41. I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows.
Elena Ferrante
#42. Engineering -nature is engineering, so is culture, science is right behind, only chaos is not an engineer- and, along with it, the furious need to reproduce.
Elena Ferrante
#43. Estrangement and belonging, an effect of distance and closeness at the same time.
Elena Ferrante
#44. 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.
Elena Ferrante
#45. Reason, by a weariness that made everything around
Elena Ferrante
#47. To carry out any project to which you attach your own name you have to love yourself.
Elena Ferrante
#48. We have too much stuff inside and it swells us, breaks us.
Elena Ferrante
#49. 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.
Elena Ferrante
#50. Was at a good point, even though I hadn't even started it. Then I set off
Elena Ferrante
#51. The daily standard of unlivability isn't news. So when the exceptional passes, everything is silent and everything continues to rot.
Elena Ferrante
#52. Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote.
Elena Ferrante
#53. She deserved him because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not to hope that he would want her.
Elena Ferrante
#54. I, too, would find out that old age is a brute, ferocious beast.
Elena Ferrante
#55. Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories ... The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.
Elena Ferrante
#56. He said we lived in a provincial country, where every occasion was an opportunity for complaining, but meanwhile no one rolled up his sleeves and reorganized things, trying to make them function.
Elena Ferrante
#57. When you haven't been in the world long, it's hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don't even feel the need to. Adults,
Elena Ferrante
#58. I began to weep with loneliness. What was I, who was I? I felt pretty again, my pimples were gone, the sun and the sea had made me slimmer, and yet the person I liked and whom I wished to be liked by showed no interest in me.
Elena Ferrante
#60. She grumbled, she said sarcastically that men place such an enormous importance on fucking, she laughed: not Marcello - although even he doesn't joke - but Michele, who went crazy, he's been obsessed with me for a long time, and even runs after the shadow of my shadow.
Elena Ferrante
#61. The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women's intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn't realize it. I waited in silence
Elena Ferrante
#62. Not for you," Lila replies ardently, "you're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.
Elena Ferrante
#63. Even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina.
Elena Ferrante
#64. I doubt that work ennobles man and I am absolutely certain that it does not ennoble woman.
Elena Ferrante
#65. One writes to inflict pain on those who wish to inflict pain.
Elena Ferrante
#66. 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.
Elena Ferrante
#67. I was stunned. Fernando looked out, still screaming horrible threats at his daughter. He had thrown her like a thing.
Elena Ferrante
#68. Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.
Elena Ferrante
#69. What a waste it would be, I said to myself, to ruin our story by leaving too much space for ill feelings: ill feelings are inevitable, but the essential thing is to keep them in check.
Elena Ferrante
#70. When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it.
Elena Ferrante
#71. But I've always had a low voice, I can't yell, the words fall a short distance away like a handful of pebbles thrown by a child.
Elena Ferrante
#72. If love is exiled from cities, their good nature becomes an evil nature.
Elena Ferrante
#73. She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.
Elena Ferrante
#74. There are moments when we resort to senseless formulations and advance absurd claims to hide straightforward feelings.
Elena Ferrante
#75. We walked for a long time. We kissed, we embraced on the Lungarno, I asked him, half serious, half joking, if he wanted to sneak into my room. He shook his head, he went back to kissing me passionately. There were entire libraries separating him and Antonio, but they were similar.
Elena Ferrante
#76. 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.
Elena Ferrante
#77. The waves rolled in like blue metal tubes carrying an egg white of foam on their peaks, then broke in a thousand glittering splinters and came up to the street with an oh of wonder and fear from those watching.
Elena Ferrante
#78. Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.
Elena Ferrante
#79. When I gave signs of protest she nearly reminded me of the money she was giving me. She stopped in time, but not so that I didn't understand: it was like when someone is about to hit you and then doesn't.
Elena Ferrante
#80. 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.
Elena Ferrante
#81. 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.
Elena Ferrante
#82. At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.
Elena Ferrante
#83. Yes, yes, resign yourself to what you are, each on his own path.
Elena Ferrante
#84. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.
Elena Ferrante
#86. At the fourth flight Lila did something unexpected. She stopped to wait for me, and when I reached her she gave me her hand. This gesture changed everything between us forever.
Elena Ferrante
#87. Move on another plane in the name of one's own difference.
Elena Ferrante
#88. A book, an article, could make noise, but ancient warriors before the battle also made noise, and if it wasn't accompanied by real force and immeasurable violence it was only theater.
Elena Ferrante
#89. Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.
Elena Ferrante
#90. Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others.
Elena Ferrante
#91. So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him.
Elena Ferrante
#92. The world had retreated. I felt sunk inside myself, inside my flesh, which seemed to me not only the sole dwelling possible but also the only material for which it was worthwhile to struggle. It
Elena Ferrante
#93. I let his rose wither in a vase on my desk, a vase painfully empty of flowers since the long-ago time when, on my birthday, Mario would give me a cattleya, in imitation of Swann. In the evening the flower was already black and bent on its stem. I threw it in the trash.
Elena Ferrante
#94. I'll give you treasure chests full of gold pieces, I know the value of spending time with you." I
Elena Ferrante
#95. Elena Ferrante is the author of several novels. There is nothing mysterious about her, given how she manifests herself - perhaps even too much - in her own writing, the place where her creative life transpires in absolute fullness.
Elena Ferrante
#96. The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand.
Elena Ferrante
#97. Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn't agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life.
Elena Ferrante
#98. Competition between women is good only if it does not prevail; that is to say if it coexists with affinity, affection, with a real sense of being mutually indispensable, with sudden peaks of solidarity in spite of envy, jealousy and the whole inevitable cohort of bad feelings.
Elena Ferrante
#99. We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.
Elena Ferrante
#100. 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.
Elena Ferrante
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