Quotes from Elena Ferrante

Sim, eu dizia, vamos fazer, vamos imaginar, até na vida adulta, um monte de coisas insensatas, por alegria ou por exaustão.

The problem is that real change takes a long time, while life hits us right away, now, with all its contradictions.

I left. Just now that I was becoming a writer, there was no one in the entire neighborhood capable of saying: What an extraordinary thing you've done.

We have too much stuff inside and it swells us, breaks us.

I was blind, she a falcon; I had an opaque pupil, she narrowed her eyes, with darting glances that saw more; I clung to her arm, among the shadows, she guided me with a stern gaze.

it seemed to me that I had mastered words to the point of sweeping away forever the contradictions of being in the world, the surge of emotions, and breathless speech. In short, 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.

Money gave even more force to the impression that what I lacked she had, and vice versa, in a continuous game of exchanges and reversals that, now happily, now painfully, made us indispensable to each other.

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. But it won't be worse that the past.

At those moments I took it for granted that there was not and never would be a manuscript of Lila's. I had always overestimated her, nothing memorable would emerge from her - something that reassured me and yet truly upset me. I loved Lila. I wanted her to last. But I wanted it to be I who made her last. I thought it was my task. I was convinced that she herself, as a girl, had assigned it to me.

Falei de como tinha tentado desde sempre, a fim de me impor, ser um homem na inteligência - percebi-me inventada pelos homens, colonizada por sua imaginação

I don't want anything, I'm made of nothing. I hoped to wake in the morning without desires.

Was it possible that I—short, too full-figured, wearing glasses, I diligent but not intelligent, I who pretended to be cultured, informed, when I wasn't—could have believed that he would like me even just for the length of a vacation?

Amalia avait l'imprévisibilité d'une écharde.

That answer, as Lila's answers always were, always had been, though intended to be conciliatory, had something arrogant, scornful, about it, which made Pinuccia even angrier.

some people are always saved and some perish.

The daughter of the shoemaker, who had no bosom and didn't get her period and didn't even have a boyfriend, became in a few days the most reliable dispenser of advice on affairs of the heart.

Loving courses together with hating, and I can't, I can't manage to solidify myself around any goodwill.

Maybe," she said, and I saw that I had hurt her as she had hurt me.

I observed her, amazed and disappointed, and determined to not be like her, to become truly different and so show her that it was useless and cruel to frighten us with her repeated 'You will never ever ever see me again'; instead she should have changed for real, or left home for real, left us, disappeared. How I suffered for her and for myself, how ashamed I was to have come out of the belly of such an unhappy person.

Ya da daha s?k olarak emin olduÄŸum konu, büyük bir giriÅŸime ad?m atarken kaynaklar?m?z hakk?nda doÄŸru bir hesap yapmam?z gerektiÄŸiydi; çünkü örneÄŸin bir kule inÅŸa edeceksek ve elimizde en son ta??n paras? haz?r deÄŸilse bu iÅŸe hiç baÅŸlamamal?yd?k.

Sarratore's son is really unbearable.

I concentrated on training myself to react little or not at all. I learned to reduce my emotions to the minimum.

J'espérais que ça passerait, mais infériorité et honte ne firent que s'intensifier.

She said that since then she had been very careful never to forget that we are very crowded beings, full of physics, astrophysics, biology, religion, soul, bourgeoisie, proletariat, capital, work, profit, politics, many harmonious phrases, many unharmonious, the chaos inside and the chaos outside.