Elena Ferrante Quotes

“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.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

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

“Leave, instead. Get away for good, far from the life we've lived since birth. Settle in well-organized lands where everything really is possible. I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it's not the neighborhood that's sick, it's not Naples, it's the entire earth, it's the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.”

— Elena Ferrante

“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

“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

“Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.”

— Elena Ferrante

“Maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset,”

— Elena Ferrante

“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

“There are moments when we resort to senseless formulations and advance absurd claims to hide straightforward feelings.”

— Elena Ferrante

“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

“The laws work for those who fear them, not for those who violate them.”

— Elena Ferrante

“Nowhere is it written that you can't do it.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

“I feel like the knight in an ancient romance as, wrapped in his shining armor, after performing a thousand astonishing feats throughout the world, he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdues and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage.”

— Elena Ferrante

“I gave in continuously, with painful pleasure, to waves of unhappiness.”

— Elena Ferrante

We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.

— Elena Ferrante

“Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.”

— Elena Ferrante

“In recent years I had begun to be interested in fashion, to educate my taste under Adele's guidance, and now I enjoyed dressing up. But sometimes - especially when I had dressed not only to make a good impression in general, but for a man - preparing myself (this was the word) seemed to me to have something ridiculous about it. All that struggle, all that time spent camouflaging myself when I could be doing something else. The colors that suited me, the ones that didn't, the styles that made me look thinner, those that made me fatter, the cut that flattered me, the one that didn't. A lengthy, costly preparation. Reducing myself to a table set for the sexual appetite of the male, to a well-cooked dish to make his mouth water.”

— Elena Ferrante

“In my spare time I didn't go out, I sat and read novels I got from the library: Grazia Deledda, Pirandello, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky.”

— Elena Ferrante

“Lies are better than tranquilizers.”

— Elena Ferrante

“It's only and always the two of us who are involved, she who wants me to give her what nature and circumstances kept, I who can't give what she demands; she who gets angry at my inadequacy and out of spite wants to reduce me to nothing, as she has done with herself, I who have written for months and months to give her a form whose boundaries won't dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn, calm myself.”

— Elena Ferrante

“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

“On the page was exactly what I had written, but it was clearer, more immediate. The erasures, the transpositions, the small additions, and, in some way, her handwriting itself gave me the impression that I had escaped from myself and now was running a hundred paces ahead with an energy and also a harmony that the person left behind didn't know she had.”

— Elena Ferrante

“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

“I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet”

— Elena Ferrante

“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

“Is it possible that in all those years she left me nothing of herself, or, worse, that I didn't want to keep anything of her? It is. This”

— Elena Ferrante

“Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense”

— Elena Ferrante

“On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins, The term isn't mine, she always used it. She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared. That night, on the terrace where we were celebrating the arrival of 1959, when she was abruptly struck by that sensation, she was frightened and kept it to herself, still unable to name it. It was only years later, one night in November 1980
we were thirty-six, were married, had children
that she recounted in detail what had happened to her then, what still sometimes happened to her, and she used that term for the first time.”

— Elena Ferrante

“Was at a good point, even though I hadn't even started it. Then I set off”

— Elena Ferrante

“Naples was the great European metropolis where faith in technology, in science, in economic development, in the kindness of nature, in history that leads of necessity to improvement, in democracy, was revealed, most clearly and far in advance, to be completely without foundation.”

— Elena Ferrante

“I, too, would find out that old age is a brute, ferocious beast.”

— Elena Ferrante

“I felt that fear in me could not put down roots, and even the lava, the fiery stream of melting matter settled in my mind in orderly sentences, a pavement of black stones like the streets of Naples, where I was always and no matter what at the center. Everything that struck me
my studies, books, Franco, Pietro, the children, Nino, the earthquake
would pass, and I, whatever I among those I was accumulating, I would remain firm. 179”

— Elena Ferrante

“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

We gazed at the constellations, praising the portentous architecture of the sky with trite formulas.

— Elena Ferrante

The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.

— Elena Ferrante

“What is clear to me, always, is that the writing must never lose sight of truth as its ultimate goal. Page after page, the drive to capture what is true, and not what resembles the truth, shapes the work. If, even for a few passages, the tone becomes false-that is, too studied, too limpid, too regimented, too well-phrased-I am obliged to stop and to figure out where I started to go wrong. If I can't, I throw everything away.”

— Elena Ferrante

“Perhaps the idea of money as a cement to solidify our existence and prevent it from dissolving, together with the people who were dear to us, endured. But”

— Elena Ferrante

“Even if I tried to tell myself that I had given him nothing, that the children were mostly mine, that they had remained within the radius of my body, subject to my care, still I couldn't avoid thinking what aspects of his nature inevitably lay hidden in them. [ ... ] How much of him would I be forced to love forever, without even realizing it, simply by virtue of the fact that I loved them? What a complex foamy mixture a couple is. Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn't die, it doesn't want to die.”

— Elena Ferrante

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

Up or down, it seemed to us that we were always going toward something terrible that had existed before us yet had always been waiting for us, just for us. 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, 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, or the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this is the night.

— Elena Ferrante

“I concluded that first of all I had to understand better what I was. Investigate my nature as a woman. I had been excessive, I had striven to give myself male capacities. I thought I had to know everything, be concerned with everything. What did I care about politics, about struggles. I wanted to make a good impression on men, be at their level. At the level of what, of their reason, most unreasonable.”

— Elena Ferrante

She possessed intelligence and didn't put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the world are merely a sign of vulgarity. That was the fact that must have beguiled Nino: the gratuitousness of Lila's intelligence.

— Elena Ferrante

“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

“I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.”

— Elena Ferrante

“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

“I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.”

— Elena Ferrante

“Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it.”

— Elena Ferrante

“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