Quotes from Elena Ferrante

And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I'm safe?

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.

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.

But not even then did I lose my composure. I continued to proceed with circumspection, as I always had before the accidents of life. The only external sign of my agitation was an inclination to disorder and a weakness in my fingers, and, the more the anguish increased, the harder they found it to close solidly around things.

Forse dovresti imparare a capire chi sono gli amici e chi i nemici.

I couldn't calm down. Was it possible that Mario should leave me like this, without warning? It seemed to me incredible that all of a sudden he had become uninterested in my life, like a plant watered for years that is abruptly allowed to die of drought. I couldn't conceive that he had unilaterally decided that he no longer owed me any attention.

While Otto ran here and there, carefully choosing places to urinate, I felt over every inch of my body the scratches of sexual abandonment, the danger of drowning in scorn for myself and nostalgia for him. I got up and went back along the path; I whistled again, and waited for Otto to return.

and there those who knew how to dance danced and those who didn't learned.

He didn't want her the way he generally wanted women, to feel them under him, to turn them over, turn them again, open them up, break them, step on them, and crush them. He didn't want her in order to have sex and then forget her. He wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last.

Si te enseñan las cosas bien desde pequeña, de mayor todo te cuesta menos, te convierte en alguien que parece haber nacido enseñada.

Toda relación intensa entre seres humanos está plagada de cepos y si se quiere que dure hay que aprender a esquivarlos.

talvez, diante do abandono, sejamos todos iguais; talvez nem mesmo uma cabeça muito disciplinada consiga suportar a descoberta de não ser amada.

The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand.

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.

La prima volta che ho visto Enzo è stato a una festa da ballo e abbiamo ballato questo ballo qui" la sentii dire. "Quanto tempo fa?" "Questo 23 maggio diciassette anni." ââ'¬Å"È passato molto tempo." "Non è passato nemmeno un minuto.

had always studied in disorder.

Would she always do the things I was supposed to do, before and better than me? She eluded me when I followed her and meanwhile stayed close on my heels in order to pass me by?

Maybe I should erase Lila from myself like a drawing from the blackboard, I thought, for, I think, the first time. I felt fragile, exposed, I couldn't spend my time following her or discovering that she was following me, either way feeling diminished. I immediately went to find her.

Parole: con quelle si fa e si disfa come si vuole.

The 'right reading' is an invention of academics and critics. Every reader gets from the book he is reading nothing else but his book. The shelves where we line up the volumes we've read are deceptive. We have available there only titles, covers, pages. But the books we've truly read are phantoms conjured up by reading with no rules.

La explotación del hombre por el hombre y la lógica del máximo beneficio, antes consideradas una abominación, volvían a ser en todas partes las bases de la libertad y la democracia.

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

Non riuscivo più a essere innocente, dietro i pensieri c'erano altri pensieri, l'infanzia era finita.

That last phrase, 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. I had something to learn.