Top 100 Ferrante Quotes
#1. Although the villagers rose with the sun to work the fields, attend to the animals, bake their bread, and begin their long list of chores, for me, Leya Truelong, this was a day like no other. Today, Wren River was touched by the fantastic.
Desiccate by Bonnie Ferrante
Bonnie Ferrante
#3. And in that city Ferrante's rise began, at the outer edge of the Spanish court, where he learned that the virtue of sovereigns is their caprice, and Power is an insatiable monster, to be served with slavish devotion in order to snatch every crumb falling from that table.
Umberto Eco
#4. 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
#5. The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn't find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as if she had never had it.
Elena Ferrante
#6. 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
#7. I had less success in the courtyard. There only love and boyfriends counted.
Elena Ferrante
#8. 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
#9. Why, then, even when I advanced, was I so quick to retreat? Why did I always have ready a gracious smile, a happy laugh, when things went badly? Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?
Elena Ferrante
#10. Maybe there's no second time without a third, but there is a first time without a second.
Elena Ferrante
#11. 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
#12. Ah, the violence: tearing, killing, ripping. Lila, between fascination and horror, spoke to me in a mixture of dialect, Italian, and very educated quotations that she had taken from who knows where and remembered by heart. The entire planet, she said, is a big Fosso Carbonario.
Elena Ferrante
#13. I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?
Elena Ferrante
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity.
Elena Ferrante
#17. Now I'm reading an old article on San Giovanni a Carbonara, where it explains what the Carbonara or Carboneto was. I thought that there was coal there once, and coal miners. But no, it was the place for the
Elena Ferrante
#18. Even if we're continually tempted to lower our guard - for love or weariness, for sympathy or kindness - we women shouldn't do it. We can lose from one moment to the next everything that we've achieved.
Elena Ferrante
#19. starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.
Elena Ferrante
#20. My tone must have seemed hostile, even though I wasn't angry or offended; there was just a touch of sarcasm. He tried to respond but he did so in an awkward, muddled way, half in dialect, half in Italian. He said he was sure that his mother was wandering around Naples as usual.
Elena Ferrante
#21. They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.
Elena Ferrante
#22. 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
#23. How difficult it was to find one's way, how difficult it was not to violate any of the incredibly detailed male regulations.
Elena Ferrante
#24. 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
#25. I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
Elena Ferrante
#26. 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
#27. She went like that saint who, although she still has her head on her shoulders, is carrying it in her hands, as if it had already been cut off.
Elena Ferrante
#28. When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.
Elena Ferrante
#29. There are people who leave and people who know how to be left.
Elena Ferrante
#31. Lila shook her head skeptically. She was trying to understand, we were both trying to understand, and understanding was something that we loved to do.
Elena Ferrante
#32. Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense
Elena Ferrante
#33. The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
Elena Ferrante
#34. When the task we give ourselves has the urgency of passion, there's nothing that can keep us from completing it.
Elena Ferrante
#35. 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
#36. But her husband was sleeping, he had fallen asleep as if wrapped in a magic cape.
Elena Ferrante
#37. Thus the story of the facts has to reckon with filters, deferments, partial truths, half lies: from it comes an arduous measurement of time passed that is based completely on the unreliable measuring device of words.
Elena Ferrante
#38. Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it.
Elena Ferrante
#39. The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.
Elena Ferrante
#40. He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.
Elena Ferrante
#41. 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
Elena Ferrante
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. I soon discovered that I was getting used to being happy and unhappy at the same time, as if that were the new, inevitable law of my life.
Elena Ferrante
#45. Because what is the face, what finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise, rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature.
Elena Ferrante
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence.
Elena Ferrante
#49. I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes.
Elena Ferrante
#50. Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones.
Elena Ferrante
#51. The solitude of women's minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it's a waste to be separated from each other without procedures, without tradition.
Elena Ferrante
#52. We told each other everything, even the little things, and were happy.
Elena Ferrante
#53. 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?
Elena Ferrante
#54. Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me...I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.
Elena Ferrante
#55. 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
#56. Nino has something that's eating him inside, like Lila, and it's a gift and a suffering; they aren't content, they never give in, they fear what is happening around them.
Elena Ferrante
#57. Answered slowly: I don't know, I don't want to know. And then I admitted that there had been a kind of admiration for her body, maybe that, yes, but I ruled out anything ever happening between us. Too much fear, if we had been seen we would have been beaten to death.
Elena Ferrante
#58. The laws work for those who fear them, not for those who violate them.
Elena Ferrante
#59. In his view love ended only when it was possible to return to oneself without fear or disgust,
Elena Ferrante
#60. 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.
Elena Ferrante
#61. Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.
Elena Ferrante
#62. 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
#64. I there first felt the impact of time, the force that was pushing me toward forty, the velocity with which life was consumed, the concreteness of the exposure to death: If it's happening to her, I thought, there's no escape, it will happen to me as well.
Elena Ferrante
#65. you have to get your hands dirty if you want to change things.
Elena Ferrante
#66. 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
#67. 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.
Elena Ferrante
#68. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first.
Elena Ferrante
#69. You can't leave me here to hope, when in reality you've already decided everything.
Elena Ferrante
#70. Women, in all fields - whether mothers or not - still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections.
Elena Ferrante
#71. We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
Elena Ferrante
#72. 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.
Elena Ferrante
#73. I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet of my mind. I can't stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, break.
Elena Ferrante
#74. 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
#75. In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed.
Elena Ferrante
#76. I knew - perhaps I hoped - that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again.
Elena Ferrante
#77. 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
#78. Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now:
Elena Ferrante
#81. How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they're at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function. To say : I am your history, you begin from me, listen to me, it could be useful to you.
Elena Ferrante
#82. 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.
Elena Ferrante
#83. You wanted to write novels, I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality.
Elena Ferrante
#84. You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.
Elena Ferrante
#85. Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive.
Elena Ferrante
#86. I felt that there was no irony, it was a real compliment. Then she added with sudden harshness: "I don't want to read anything else that you write." "Why?" She thought about it. "Because it hurts me," and she struck her forehead with her hand and burst out laughing.
Elena Ferrante
#87. And yet now that we were seventeen the substance of time itself no longer seemed fluid but had assumed a gluelike consistency and churned around us like a yellow cream in a confectioner's machine.
Elena Ferrante
#88. One can't go on anymore, she said, electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave traces of yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes.
Elena Ferrante
#89. 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
#90. I've known how to whistle since I was five years old.
Elena Ferrante
#92. I wrote my book to free myself from it, not to be its prisoner.
Elena Ferrante
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. She was like that, she threw things off balance just to see if she could put them back in some other way.
Elena Ferrante
#98. 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
#100. Individuals and cities without love are a danger to themselves and to others.
Elena Ferrante
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