Quotes from Elena Ferrante

un buen relato es el que se escribe desde el fondo de nuestra vida

Literary work couldn't seriously force the whirlpool of debris that constituted the real into any grammatical or syntactical order.

Losing your anchor, feeling yourself to be light is not an advantage, it's cruel to yourself and to others.

As a girl I had liked obscene language, it gave me a sense of masculine freedom. Now I knew that obscenity could raise sparks of madness if it came from a mouth as controlled as mine. So I closed my eyes, I held my hands and squeezed my eyelids.

Only when we feel the story in each of its moments or places are we able to tell it properly.

On the other hand I wasn't really depressed. I felt, rather, as if I had left myself somewhere and was no longer able to find myself: I was worn out, that is, by movements that were too quick and barely coordinated, by the urgency of one who is searching everywhere and has no time to waste.

How and when words escape from books and the books end up seeming like empty graves is something to think about.

I wrote my book to free myself from it, not to be its prisoner.

Reality can't stay inside the elegant moulds of art; it always spills over, indecorously. An enemy may simply be someone who, out of a sort of emotional exhaustion, has avoided the effort, the complexity, the pleasure - all the ambiguities of friendship.

Dealings with the world, yes, at any time they are entirely ours. But the words--the written form in which we enclose them, attentive to the red margins of our notebooks--are not. We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own: in my view that is a lazy way of talking about writing. Writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned.

The daily standard of unlivability isn't news. So when the exceptional passes, everything is silent and everything continues to rot.

Un Dio facile non è Dio. Lui è altro da noi. Non si comunica con Dio, è così oltre il nostro livello che non può essere interrogato, ma solo invocato. Se si manifesta, lo fa in silenzio, per piccoli preziosi segnali muti che vengono da nomi del tutto comuni. Fare la sua volontà è piegare la testa e obbligarsi a credergli.

No lo sé, es difícil dar una respuesta tajante que sea cierta

It was the word for a disquiet not otherwise definable, it referred to a miscellaneous crowd of things in her head, debris in a muddy water of the brain. The frantumaglia was mysterious, it provoked mysterious actions, it was the source of all suffering not traceable to a single obvious cause.

Even if we're continually tempted to lower our guard - for love or weariness, for sympathy or kindness - we women shouldn't do it. We can lose from one moment to the next everything that we've achieved.

There was something malevolent in the inequality, and now I knew it. It acted in the depths, it dug deeper than money.

As coisas mais difíceis de falar são as que nós mesmos não conseguimos entender.

esto ocurre cuando en la cabeza tienes un clamor y sigues escribiendo como al dictado, incluso cuando estás haciendo la compra

connection between anxiety and ugliness unexpectedly consoled me.

El reto para quien escribe es llenar la distancia entre lo que vives y lo que cuentas, sentir físicamente el impacto de la narración... A menudo, empezamos a escribir demasiado pronto y las páginas aún están frías. Solo cuando la historia se acopla a nosotros como un guante, ha llegado el momento de contarla.

Existir é isto, pensei, um sobressalto de alegria, uma pontada de dor, um prazer intenso, veias que fremem sob a pele, e não há outra verdade que se possa contar.

Am meisten fürchten müssen wir uns vor der Raserei verängstigter Menschen.

el momento en que la escritura parece cuidarse únicamente de sacar adelante la historia. Es ahí donde radica por completo la alegría de escribir.

I want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes.