Quotes from Elena Ferrante

Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object.

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

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

Males always have something pathetic about them, at every age. A fragile arrogance, a frightened audacity. I no longer know, today, if they ever aroused in me love or only an affectionate sympathy for their weaknesses.

Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of 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 said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes.

Lies are better than tranquilizers.

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

No, to produce ideas you don't have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.

Why, then, even when I advanced, was I so quick to retreat? Why did I always have ready a gracious smile, a happy laugh, when things went badly? Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?

starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.

the laws work for those who fear them, not for those who violate them.

I'm not wise, but I read a lot of novels.

I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness.

So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him.

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.

I gave in continuously, with painful pleasure, to waves of unhappiness.

I realized she wanted many things at the same time, and that kept her in a permanent state of dissatisfaction.

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

maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset

Because what is the face, what finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise, rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature.

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

The depressed don't write books. People who are happy write, people who travel, are in love, and talk and talk with the conviction that, one way or another, their words always go to the right place." "Isn't that how it is?" No, words rarely go to the right place, and if they do, it's only for a very brief time. Otherwise they're useful for speaking nonsense, as now. Or for pretending that everything is under control.

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