Elena Ferrante Quotes

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Quotes About Elena Ferrante

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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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
The whole future---I thought---will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
We consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women. We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it's the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by 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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
On Napoli, Elena Ferrante is more ferocious than Roberto Savino. ~ Angela Paolantonio
Elena Ferrante quotes by Angela Paolantonio
There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
No one depended anymore on my care and, finally, even I was no longer a
burden to myself. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Lila is right, one writes not so much to write, one writes to inflict pain on those who wish to inflict pain. The pain of words against the pain of kicks and punches and the instruments of death. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Nowhere is it written that you can't do it. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
I tend toward an expansive sentence that has a cold surface and, visible underneath it, a magma of unbearable heat. I want readers to know from the first lines what they will have to deal with. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Not for you," Lila replies ardently, "you're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Sarratore's son is really unbearable. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
My breasts are small," I said in a whisper, but immediately despised myself because it sounded as if I were making excuses, excuse me if I can't offer you big tits, I hope you enjoy yourself anyway, idiot that I was, if he liked little tits, good; if not, the worse for him, it was all free, a stroke of luck had fallen to this shit, the best birthday present he could hope for, at his age. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
But the happy ending has to do with the tricks of the narrative, not with life, or even love, which is an uncontrollable, changeable feeling, with nasty surprises that are alien to the happy ending. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
I sat on a bench and did what, as a girl, I had done whenever I needed to calm myself: instead of pressing the button with the number 4 on it, I let myself go up to the sixth floor. That space had been empty and dark for many years, ever since the lawyer who had his office there had left, taking with him even the light bulb from the landing. When the elevator stopped, I let my breath glide into my stomach and then return slowly to my throat. As always, after a few seconds, the light in the elevator went out, too. I thought of reaching my hand out to one of the door handles: you had only to pull it and the light would return. But I didn't move and continued to send my breath deep into my body. The only sound was that of the woodworms eating into the panelled walls.

Just a few months earlier (five, six?), on a sudden impulse, I had revealed to my mother, during one of my brief visits, that as an adolescent I used to retreat to that secret place, and I brought her up there, to the top. Maybe I wanted to try to establish an intimacy that there had never been, maybe I wanted to let her know in some confused way that I had always been unhappy. But she seemed to me only amused by the fact that I had sat suspended in the void, in a dilapidated elevator. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
The next day, at breakfast and during the entire drive to Milan, he talked passionately about what he considered the most exciting period of his life, the years between 1945 and 1948. I heard in his voice a genuine melancholy, which vanished, however, when he went on to describe with an equally genuine enthusiasm the new climate of revolution, the energy - he said - that was infusing young and old. I kept nodding yes, struck by how important it was for him to convince me that my present was in fact the return of his thrilling past. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
I listened, I understood and I didn't understand. Long ago she had threatened Marcello with the shoemaker's knife simply because he had dared to grab my wrist and break the bracelet. From that point on, I was sure that if Marcello had just brushed against her she would have killed him. But toward Stefano, now, she showed no explicit aggression. Of course, the explanation was simple: we had seen our fathers beat our mothers from childhood. We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us. As ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Everything is interesting if you know how to work on it. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it's not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It's not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
One writes to inflict pain on those who wish to inflict pain. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Beautiful everywhere, outside and in, male fantasies. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
For example, I came to my exams very well prepared, but if the professor were suddenly to ask me, "Do you know from what works I derive the authority on the basis of which I teach this subject in this university?" I wouldn't know what to answer. But the others knew. So I moved among them fearful of saying and doing the wrong things. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by 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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Yes, yes, resign yourself to what you are, each on his own path. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by 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
Elena Ferrante quotes by 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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
the park had climbed up to ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Estrangement and belonging, an effect of distance and closeness at the same time. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
The girl, perhaps without even realizing it, and who knows for how long, had been assessing the power of her swaying body, her restless eyes, on my husband; and he looked at her as one looks from a gray area at a white wall struck by the sun. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Today I feel some uneasiness in recalling how much I suffered, I have no sympathy for myself of that time. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
..what a terrible thing a dissatisfied mind is. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
But the condition of wife had enclosed her in a sort of glass container, like a sailboat sailing with sails unfurled in an inaccessible place, without the sea. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by 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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
We were twelve years old, but we walked along the hot streets of the neighborhood, amid the dust and flies that the occasional old trucks stirred up as they passed, like two old ladies taking the measure of lives of disappointment, clinging tightly to each other. No one understood us, only we two - I thought - understood one another. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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 ... ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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? ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Mario, I wrote, to give myself courage, had not taken away the world, he had taken away only himself. And you are not a woman of thirty years ago. You are of today, take hold of today, don't regress, don't lose yourself, keep a tight grip. Above all, don't give into distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. He's gone, you're still here. You'll no longer enjoy the gleam of his eyes, of his words, but so what? Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness, don't let yourself break like an ornament, you're not a knickknack, no woman is a knickknack. La femme rompue, ah, rompue, the destroyed woman, destroyed, shit. My job, I thought, is to demonstrate that one can remain healthy. Demonstrate it to myself, no one else. If I am exposed to lizards, I will fight the lizards. If I am exposed to ants, I will fight the ants. If I am exposed to thieves, I will fight the thieves. If I am exposed to myself, I will fight myself. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
I slept again but only for a few minutes. Then I fell into a torpor crowded with images, in which, without wanting to, I began to tell myself about my mother. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
We are flying over a ball of fire. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by 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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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. ~ Elena Ferrante
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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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
I had long since realized that each of us organizes memory as it suits him, I'm still surprised when I do it myself. But it surprised me that one could go so far as to give the facts an arrangement that went against one's own interests. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
She said that we didn't know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to understand anything, that everything in the neighbourhood, every stone or piece of wood, everything, anything you could name, was already there before us, but we had grown up without realizing it, without ever even thinking about it. Not just us. Her father pretended that there had been nothing before. Her mother did the same, my mother, my father, even Rino. And yet Stefano's grocery store before, had been the carpenter shop of Alfredo Peluso, Pasquale's father. And yet Don Achille's money had been made before. And the Solaras' money as well. She had tested this out on her father and mother. They didn't know anything, they wouldn't talk about anything. Not Fascism, not the king. No injustice, no oppression, no exploitation. They hated Don Achille and were afraid of the Solaras. But they overlooked it and went to spend their money both at Don Achille's son's and at the Solaras', and sent us, too. And they votes for the Fascists, for the monarchists, as the Solaras wanted them to. And they thought that what had happened before was past, and in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too. ~ Elena Ferrante
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She was skinny, like a salted anchovy, she gave off an odor of wildness, she had a long face, narrow at the temples, framed by two bands of smooth black hair. But ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
She was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being all her own, that was still obscure to her. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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? ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
I've known how to whistle since I was five years old. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
The daily standard of unlivability isn't news. So when the exceptional passes, everything is silent and everything continues to rot. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Next to her, in the place where we were born, I was only a decoration, that is, I bore witness to Lila's merits. Those who had known us from birth attributed to her, to the force of her attraction, the fact that the neighborhood could have on its streets an esteemed person like me. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Every choice has its history, so many moments of our existence are shoved into a corner, waiting for an outlet, and in the end the outlet arrives. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Was at a good point, even though I hadn't even started it. Then I set off ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
In fiction we say and recognize things about ourselves, which, for the sake of propriety, we ignore or don't talk about in reality. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
I'll give you treasure chests full of gold pieces, I know the value of spending time with you." I ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by 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
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
You wanted to write novels, I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
Is it true that you don't love me anymore?"
"Yes."
"Why? Because I lied to you? Because I left you? Because I humiliated you?"
"No. Just when I felt deceived, abandoned, humiliated, I loved you very much, I wanted you more than in any other moment of our life together."
"And then?"
"I don't love you anymore because, to justify yourself, you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn't true."
"It was."
"No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don't know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla's body. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
I'm lying, yes, but why do you force me to give a linear explanation; linear explanations are almost always lies. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
To carry out any project to which you attach your own name you have to love yourself. ~ Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante quotes by Elena Ferrante
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