Quotes from Elena Ferrante

Tiene miedo, dijo, siempre fue así; tiene miedo de las enfermedades y la muerte. Giannì, todas las personas soberbias, todas las que se lo tienen muy creído hacen como si la muerte no existiera.

But above all I no longer wanted to know if it was strychnine or something else that had killed Otto. The dog had fallen through a hole in the net of events. We leave so many of them, lacerations of negligence, when we put together cause and effect. The essential thing was that the string, the weave that now supported me, should hold. 43.

El dolor no cuajó alrededor de nada.

She expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but – further – she left no trace of effort, you weren't aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, the confusion of the oral.

they had an ability to classify, a logical lucidity, that Professor Galiani didn't possess.

Il mondo è tornato al suo posto." Lei replicò sfottente: "Quale posto?

in reality it was much simpler. For at least ten years the God of childhood, already fairly weak, had been pushed aside like an old sick person, and I felt no need for the sanctity of marriage. The

Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. I did so then, and finally

Per favore, per favore, non mi lasciare adesso, se no cado giù.

Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realized it for the first time only in that situation. I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.

Everything was moving: the sea of fire under the crust of the earth, and the furnaces of the stars, and the planets, and the universes, and the light within the darkness and the silence in the cold.

Guardami» mormorò, «so di essere cattiva a dirti queste cose, ma lui è assai più cattivo di me. Ha la cattiveria peggiore, quella della superficialità».

Sono andata via da Napoli definitivamente nel 1995, quando tutti dicevano che la città stava risorgendo. Ma ormai credevo poco alle resurrezioni. [...] Sicché quale resurrezione? Era solo cipria della modernità spruzzata a casaccio, e in maniera sbruffona, sopra la faccia corrotta della città. Ogni volta succedeva così. Il trucco della rinascenza accendeva speranze e poi si spaccava, diventava crosta sopra croste antiche.

The solitude of women's minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it's a waste to be separated from each other, without procedures, without tradition.

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, of the day before 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.

that my cult of study had always seemed to her foolish, that it wasn't books that made people good but good people who made some good books.

Oh of course it pleased me, it pleased me greatly. But I also felt as if my body had the consistency of egg shell, and a slight pressure on my arm, on my forehead, on my stomach would be enough to break it and dig out all my secrets, in particular those which were secrets even to me.

the park had climbed up to

Mia madre vedeva sempre il male dove con mio grande fastidio si scopriva presto o tardi che il male c'era davvero, e il suo occhio strabico pareva fatto apposta per individuare i movimenti segreti del rione.

religion will disappear from men's consciousness when, finally, we have constructed a world of equals, without class distinctions, and with a sound scientific conception of society and of life.

Experimentei algo que depois, ao longo de minha vida, se repetiu frequentemente: a alegria do novo

No te duele nada, Lenù. Te has inventado que tienes que renquear para que tu madre no se muera del todo, y ahora renqueas de veras, y yo te analizo, veo que te hace bien.

nu-mi amintesc s? fi crezut vreodat? c? viaÈ›a care ni se oferise era foarte urât?. ViaÈ›a era aÈ™a cum era si gata, creÈ™team cu obligaÈ›ia de a le-o face dificil? celorlalÈ›i înainte ca ei s? ne-o fac? dificil? nou?.

I felt the need, as I had long ago, to take care of him, to tend to him, to protect him, to sustain him in everything that he would do in the course of his life.