Quotes from Elena Ferrante

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.

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.

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

I know—it stayed in her head without becoming sound—I know what a comfortable life full of good intentions means, you can't even imagine what real misery is.

Não me agrada que estejas mal, eu também estou mal, a mãe também está mal, e é um bocado ridículo, não te parece, que todo esse mal signifique que tu nos queres bem.

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

If Vittoria really is that, I thought, discouraged, then she is ugly, she has the ugliness of banality.

Ci salutammo alla funicolare e da allora non l'ho più rivisto. Non osai fare domande su Roberto, non chiesi se Vittoria gli aveva parlato di me, se gli aveva raccontato i fatti di casa mia. Dissi solo, vergognandomi: "Mi sento brutta, di cattivo carattere, e tuttavia vorrei essere amata". Ma lo dissi tardi, in un soffio, quando lui già mi dava le spalle.

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

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

Biz böyleyiz, güzel düÅŸüncelerle güzelleÅŸir, kötülerle çirkinleÅŸiriz; bu nedenle onlar? zihnimizden atmam?z gerekir.

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

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 me, it's hard to say in what tangle of feelings I found myself. I always defended Lila, and I liked doing so, I liked to hear myself speak with the authority of one who is studying difficult subjects.

Si me veo expuesta a los lagartos, combatiré contra los lagartos. Si me veo expuesta a las hormigas, combatiré contra las hormigas. Si me veo expuesta a los ladrones, combatiré contra los ladrones. Si me veo expuesta a mí misma, lucharé contra mí.

La nueva carne viva copiaba en broma a la vieja, éramos una cadena de sombras que desde siempre se representaba con la misma carga de amor, odio, deseos y violencia.

Toda relação intensa entre seres humanos é cheia de armadilhas e, caso se queira que dure, é preciso aprender a desviar-se delas.

A quien me hace daño, le pago con la misma moneda. Soy el ocho de espadas, soy la avispa que pica, soy la serpiente oscura, soy el animal invulnerable que atraviesa el fuego y no se quema.

Stop it, who cares about this Dostoyevsky, who gives a damn about the Karamazovs.

Do men learn from women? Often. Do they admit it publicly? Rarely, even today.

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.

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

Finally she cried with rage and at the same time maternal pride, "What happened when I conceived you, an accident, a hiccup, a convulsion, the lights went out, a bulb blew, the basin of water fell off the night table? Certainly there must have been something, if you were born so intolerable, so different from the others.

saw the rings that I had left upon waking on the edge of the sink and I put on my finger the one with the aquamarine, while, without hesitation, I let the wedding ring fall down the drain.