Quotes from Elena Ferrante

For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first.

Beautiful everywhere, outside and in, male fantasies.

Watch me until I fall asleep. Watch me always even when you leave Naples. That way I'll know that you see me and I'm at peace.

Quando si è al mondo da poco è difficile capire quali sono i disastri all'origine del nostro sentimento del disastro, forse non se ne sente nemmeno la necessità. I grandi, in attesa di domani, si muovono in un presente dietro al quale c'è ieri o l'altro ieri o al massimo la settimana scorsa: al resto non vogliono pensare. I piccoli non sanno il significato di ieri, dell'altro ieri, e nemmeno di domani, tutto è questo, ora.

the dreams of the head ended up beneath the feet.

In conversations with my daughters I hear omitted words or phrases. Sometimes they get mad, they say Mama, I never said that, you're saying it, you invented it. But I invent nothing; you just have to listen—the unspoken says more than the spoken.

I saw her fly toward the asphalt and felt a cruel joy. She seemed to me, as she fell, an ugly creature.

a bitter sarcasm alternated with a quiet cult of memory.

What I expect from a good story is that it will tell me today what I can't know from any other source but that story, from its unique way of putting something into words, from the feeling that it implies.

Se non c'è amore, non solo inaridisce la vita delle persone, ma anche quella delle città

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

Volevo dire solo che sei brava a farti voler bene. La differenza tra me e te, da sempre, è che di me la gente ha paura e di te no.

Everything that could happen between us had happened, the rest was only complications.

Tu sei la mia amica geniale, devi diventare la più brava di tutti, maschi e femmine.

Evidently what in the fiction of the story serves in all innocence to reach the heart of the reader becomes an abomination for one who feels the echo of the facts she has really lived.

Aceptar que ser adultos es dejar de mostrarse, es aprender a ocultarse hasta desaparecer?

Cuántas palabras permanecen sin pronunciar incluso en una pareja que se ama...

Meanwhile, to consolidate a climate of benevolence, I tried to return to normal activities, like a sick person who has been in the hospital for a long time and, partly to overcome the fear of falling ill again, wants to reanchor himself to the life of the healthy.

para el que no es nadie convertirse en alguien es más importante que cualquier otra cosa.

What did I care anymore about his political opinions, about Pasquale and Nadia, about the death of Ulrike Meinhof, the birth of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the electoral advances of the Communist Party? 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.

Cuántas palabras permanecen sin pronunciar incluso en una pareja que se ama, y qué elevado es el riesgo de que otros la destruyan pronunciándolas.

Temía que en mi ausencia le ocurrieran cosas, buenas o malas. Era un temor antiguo, un temor que no había superado: el miedo de que al perderme trozos de su vida, la mía perdiera intensidad e importancia.

I felt like a drop of rain in a spiderweb, and I was careful not to slide down. We

I thought: not even Lila, in spite of everything, has managed to escape from my mother's world.