Quotes from Elena Ferrante

Palabras, con ellas se hace y se deshace a voluntad.

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

Ich bin, was ich bin, und ich kann nichts anderes tun als mich akzeptieren; ich bin so geboren, in dieser Stadt, mit diesem Dialekt, ohne Geld; ich werde geben, was ich geben kann, werde mir nehmen, was ich nehmen kann, werde ertragen, was ertragen werden muss.

I'm dead, but I'm fine

Leo muchísimo pero sin ningún orden, y olvido lo que leo.

Deja que nos hagamos ricos sin complicarnos la vida, que ya de por sí es bastante complicada.

How you like saying you love him." "Why shouldn't I like it?" "You're right, why? I was wrong: it's pointless to open the eyes of someone in love.

I had been a girl who felt lost, this was true. All the hopes of youth seemed to have been destroyed, I seemed to be falling backwards towards my mother, my grandmother, the chain of mute or angry women I came from. Missed opportunities.

Lila was happy, and she was drawing me deeper and deeper into her fierce happiness, because she had suddenly found, perhaps without even realizing it, an opportunity that allowed her to portray the fury she directed against herself, the insurgence, perhaps for the first time in her life, of the need - and here the verb used by Michele was appropriate - to erase herself.

Amalia had the unpredictability of a splinter, I couldn't impose on her the prison of a single adjective.

We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us.

I soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn't excite me, only what Lila touched became important.

If love is exiled from cities, their good nature becomes an evil nature.

my mother, before she became my mother, was followed by the man with whom she would make love, who would cover her with his name, who would annihilate her with his alphabet.

Mi sento come quando all'improvviso si mette a piovere forte, ti guardi intorno e non trovi un posto dove ripararti.

Desde hacía un tiempo yo no distinguía entre zonas públicas y privadas, no me importada que la gente me oyera y juzgara, advertía un fuerte deseo de representar mi rabia como si estuviera sobre un escenario. Cógela, le grité, no la soporto

I've never been in analysis. But it's rare that one saves oneself from a rickety landing at the top of a building by throwing oneself down the stairwell.

É tão fácil — pensei — morrer precisamente na vida das pessoas sem as quais não podemos viver?

Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many.

For children parents are always a burden. But parents who draw too much attention to themselves are intolerable.

The drive to change one's state must face countless obstacles. One can act on genetic conditioning but not ignore it. Belonging to one class or another can be camouflaged but not canceled out. The individual is in the end only a battlefield, in which privileges and disadvantages war fiercely. What counts in the end is the collective flow of generations. Even when there is both merit and luck, the efforts of a single individual are unsatisfying.

Engineering -nature is engineering, so is culture, science is right behind, only chaos is not an engineer- and, along with it, the furious need to reproduce.

Don't succumb. Fight. You are of today, take hold of today, don't regress, don't lose yourself, keep a tight grip. Above all, don't give in to distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness.

Quem te ensinou a ler e a escrever, Cerullo?» Cerullo, pequena, de cabelos e olhos escuros e de bata, com um laço cor de rosa ao pescoço e apenas seis anos de vida, respondeu: «Eu.»