Elena Ferrante Quotes

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

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.

And the plane began it's takeoff. How exciting it was to lift off from the ground with a jerk and see the houses that became parallelepipettes and the streets that changed into strips and the countryside that was reduced to a green patch and the sea that inclined like a compact paving stone and the clouds that fell below in a landslide of soft rocks and the anguish, the pain, the very happiness that became a part of a unique luminous motion. It seemed to me that flying subjected everything to a process of simplification and I sighed, I tried to lose myself. Every so often I asked Nino "are you happy?" and he nodded yes, kissed me. At times I had the impression that the floor under my feet, the only surface I could count on, was trembling.

uncultured youths who make random pronouncements on everything

Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity.

[I]t was as if I had been strolling absentmindedly and banged into a door.

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.

If I could conceal from myself the impression that the life had been drained out of me like blood and saliva and mucus from a patient during an operation, maybe I could deceive Mario as well.

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

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

I was stunned. Fernando looked out, still screaming horrible threats at his daughter. He had thrown her like a thing.

Every footfall, every voice was Don Achille creeping up behind us or coming down toward us with a long knife, the kind used for slicing open a chicken breast. There was an odor of sautéing garlic. Maria, Don Achille's wife, would put me in the pan of boiling oil, the children would eat me, he would suck my head the way my father did with mullets.

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.

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

In his view love ended only when it was possible to return to oneself without fear or disgust,

I wanted him to see in that plate of pasta everything that, by leaving, he would no longer be able to look at, or touch, or caress, listen to, smell: never again.

That year it seemed to me that I expanded like pizza dough.

No one depended anymore on my care and, finally, even I was no longer a
burden to myself.

I became disenchanted. My first impression, that of finding myself part of a fearless battle, passed. The trepidation at every exam and the joy of passing it with the highest marks had faded. Gone was the pleasure of re-educating my voice, my gestures, my way of dressing and walking, as if I were competing for the prize of best disguise, the mask worn so well that it was almost a face.

It wasn't innocent blood. To my father nothing about Amalia ever seemed innocent. He, so furious, so bitter and yet so eager for pleasure, so irascible and so egotistical, couldn't bear that she had a friendly, at times even joyful, relationship with the world. He recognized in it a trace of betrayal.

We haven't had an office open to the public for at least ten years," he answered. "And if I want to complain?" "You do it by telephone." "And if I want to spit in someone's face?" He advised me politely to try the office in Via Confienza, a hundred yards farther on.

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.

You still waste time with those things, Lenu? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Do you want to see the string of pearls that Stefano gave me?

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.

When I opened my eyes again, five hours later, at seven o'clock on Saturday August 4th, I had trouble getting my bearings. The hardest day of the ordeal of my abandonment was about to begin, but I didn't know it yet.

Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them.

She deserved him because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not to hope that he would want her.

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.

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

Even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina.

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.

My compliance without participation began to disorientate him. I thought, as always in those circumstances, that I should pretend a yearning and uncontrolled passion or push him away. But I didn't dare to either one or the other: I was afraid I would throw up, because the result would be earthquake-like waves. I had only to wait.

You put it in wrong," said Ilaria in a provocative tone.
I didn't pay attention to her, but Gianni checked and with a look of reproof showed me that I had put the side without the mercury under his armpit. Attention: attention alone could help me. I put it in correctly, Ilaria appeared satisfied, she said: I noticed it. I nodded yes, good, I made a mistake. Why - I thought - must I do a thousand things at once, for almost ten years you've been forcing me to live like this, and I'm not completely awake yet, I haven't had my coffee, I haven't made breakfast.

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.

Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.

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.

A tangle of resentments, the sense of revenge, the need to test the humiliated power of my body were burning up any residue of good sense.

I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.

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.

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.

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.

We are flying over a ball of fire.

She never said a word to me of anger or discontent. She began instead to go around with Carmela Peluso, the daughter of the carpenter-gambler, as if I were no longer enough. Within a few days we became a trio, in which, however, I, who had been first in school, was almost always the third. They talked and joked continuously with each other, or, rather, Lila talked and joked, Carmela listened and was amused. When we went for a walk between the church and the stradone, Lila was always in the middle and the two of us on the sides. If I noticed that she tended to be closer to Carmela I suffered and wanted to go home.

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.

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?

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

They were complicated years. The order of the world in which we had grown up was dissolving. The old skills resulting from long study and knowledge of the correct political line suddenly seemed senseless. Anarchist, Marxist, Gramscian, Communist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, worker were quickly becoming obsolete labels or, worse, a mark of brutality. The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere. Meanwhile, by means legal and illegal, all the accounts that remained open in the state and in the revolutionary organizations were being closed with a heavy hand. One might easily end up murdered or in jail, and among the common people a stampede had begun.

Soon, however, it wasn't a matter of ioco or practice. In that place where they threw out beasts and garbage a lot of human blood was shed. It seems that the game of throwing the prete was invented there, the stone

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.

It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.

To tolerate existence, we lie, and we lie above all to ourselves. Sometimes we tell ourselves lovely tales, sometimes petty lies. Falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reflection, they dilute the horrors of our time, they even save us from ourselves.

Success depends on the capacity to manipulate the obvious with calculated precision.

Finally he had decided that he had to free Lila, even if at that moment, perhaps, she had no desire to be freed. But - he had said to himself - it takes time for people to understand what's good and what's bad, and helping them means doing for them what in a particular moment of their life they aren't capable of doing.

Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence.

I've known how to whistle since I was five years old.

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.

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?

I doubt that work ennobles man and I am absolutely certain that it does not ennoble woman.

At the ponds that evening I said to Antonio: "It's always been like that, since we were little: everyone thinks she's bad and I'm good."
He kissed me, murmuring ironically, "Why, isn't that true?"
That response touched me and kept me from telling him that we had to part. It was a decision that seemed to me urgent, the affection wasn't love, I loved Nino, I knew I would love him forever. I had a gentle speech prepared for Antonio, I wanted to say to him: It's been wonderful, you helped me a lot at a time when I was sad, but now school is starting and this year is going to be difficult, I have new subjects, I'll have to study a lot; I'm sorry but we have to stop. I felt it was necessary and every afternoon I went to our meeting at the ponds with my little speech ready. But he was so affectionate, so passionate, that my courage failed and I put it off.

Amalia had the unpredictability of a splinter, I couldn't impose on her the prison of a single adjective.

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

I pretended to be interested in their secret undertaking, but in fact I was very sorry about it. Although the two siblings had involved me by choosing me as their confidant, it was still an experience that I could enter only as witness: on that path Lila would do great things by herself, I was excluded. But above all, how, after our intense conversations about love and poetry, could she walk me to the door, as she was doing, far more absorbed in the atmosphere of excitement around a shoe? ... What did I care about shoes. I still had, in my mind's eye, the most secret stages of that affair of violated trust, passion, poetry that became a book, and it was as if she and I had read a novel together, as if we had seen, there in the back of the shop and not in the parish hall on Sunday, a dramatic film.

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

I'm lying, yes, but why do you force me to give a linear explanation; linear explanations are almost always lies.

When the task we give ourselves has the urgency of passion, there's nothing that can keep us from completing it.

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.

Maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.

A woman's body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect's poison injected into a vein.

I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful.

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.

Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor, even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.

Everything is interesting if you know how to work on it.

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.

In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed.

Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote.

In the crush men used the women to play silent games with themselves. One stared ironically at a dark-haired girl to see if she would lower her gaze. One, with his eyes, caught a bit of lace between two buttons of a blouse, or harpooned a strap. Others passed the time looking out the window into cars for a glimpse of an uncovered leg, the play of muscles as a foot pushed break or clutch, a hand absentmindedly scratching the inside of a thigh.

I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.

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.

I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart ... But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts ...

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

But a favor has to be answered by another favor, and the courtesies became a chain that imprisoned us.

Maybe there's no second time without a third, but there is a first time without a second.

Such tensions without sense push us to formulate questions of meaning.

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.

It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

Reason, by a weariness that made everything around

She did not still feel, as I did, the anxiety about a woman who was suffering for love. What did I care about shoes. I still had, in my mind's eye, the most secret stages of that affair of violated trust, passion, poetry that became a book, and it was as if she and I had read a novel together, as if we had seen, there in the back of the shop and not in the parish hall on Sunday, a dramatic film. I

As for the other neighbors, they had been on vacation for a while already or had left Friday afternoon for a weekend in the mountains, at the sea. The three of us, too, would have been settled at least a month earlier at some seaside vacation place, as we were every year, if Mario hadn't left. The lech. Empty building, August was like that. I felt like guffawing at every door, sticking out my tongue, thumbing my nose. I didn't give a shit about them. Happy little families, good money from professions, comfort constructed by selling at a high price services that should be free. Like Mario, who allowed us to live well by selling his ideas, his intelligence, the persuasive tones of his voice when he taught. Ilaria called to me from the landing:
"I don't want to stay with the vomit stink.

Love in my case is not indispensable to pleasure, nor is respect. Is it possible, therefore, that the disgust, the humiliation begin afterward, when a man subdues you and violates you at his pleasure solely because now you belong to him, love or not, respect or not?

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

I wasn't capable of entrusting myself to true feelings. I didn't know how to be drawn beyond limits. I didn't possess that emotional power that had driven Lila to do all she could to enjoy that day and that night. I stayed behind, waiting. She, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn't afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings. She deserved Nino, in other words, because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not hope that he would want her.

Why would anyone be interested in my little personal story if we can do without Homer's or Shakespeare's? Someone who truly loves literature is like a person of faith. The believer knows very well that there is nothing at all at the bureau of vital statistics about the Jesus that truly counts for him.

You should leave your wife more time." "She has all day available." "I'm not kidding. If you don't, you're guilty not only on a human level but also on a political one." "What's the crime?" "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 for Pietro to respond. My husband reacted with sarcasm. "Elena can cultivate her intelligence when and how she likes, the essential thing is that she not take time from me." "If she doesn't take it from you, then who can she take it from?" Pietro frowned. "When the task we give ourselves has the urgency of passion, there's nothing that can keep us from completing it." I felt wounded, I whispered with a false smile: "My husband is saying that I have no true interest.

I mean that a party can't be anything other than a distributor of favors in exchange for support, ideals are part of the furniture.

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.

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.

We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.

To carry out any project to which you attach your own name you have to love yourself.

the park had climbed up to

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.