Quotes from Elena Ferrante

A language is a compendium of the history, geography, material and spiritual life, the vices and virtues, not only of those who speak it, but also of those who have spoken it through the centuries. The words, the grammar, the syntax are a chisel that shapes our thought.

Imagine that the lines an actress reads are a river that runs calmly along the surface of the earth. Then imagine that the actress are the earth, and that under the earth is another river, a wilder one whose current leaps in the opposite direction, whose roar is muted. Every time the actress speaks her lines, she must offer a glimpse of the river that runs beneath: the mysterious churn of her consciousness, the lawlessness of a person's doubts or desires.

M'immaginai una forza oscura acquattata nella vita della protagonista, un'entità che aveva la capacità di saldarle il mondo intorno, con i colori della fiamma ossidrica: una calotta azzurro-violacea dove ogni cosa le andava per il meglio schizzando scintille ma che presto si dissaldava, scindendosi in frammenti grigi privi di senso.

En los momentos de crisis, con mucha frecuencia las mujeres tratamos de calmarnos escribiendo.

Who says I'm vain?" "The comparison: your friend isn't. But I'm sorry for her, vanity is a resource. If you're vain you pay attention to yourself and your affairs.

But what my less easily verbalized emotions recorded under the word Caserta was a spinning nausea, vertigo, and a lack of air.

A woman who wants to write has unavoidably to deal not only with the entire literary patrimony she's been brought up on and in virtue of which she wants to and can express herself but with the fact that that patrimony is essentially male and by its nature doesn't provide true female sentences.

The odor was of lunchtime or dinnertime, when, coming from every doorway, the smells of the various dishes mingle in the stairwell but are ruined by a stink of mold and cobwebs.

Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote. I remember the dialect on my mother's lips when she lost that gentle cadence and yelled at us, poisoned by her unhappiness: I can't take you anymore, I can't take any more. Commands, shouts, insults, life stretching into her words, as when a frayed nerve is just touched, and the pain scrapes away all self-control.

Para los hijos los padres siempre somos molestos.

Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me.

There's nothing to be done about it, Giovanna, you really are like my sister.

How much of him would I be forced to love forever, without even realizing it, simply by virtue of the fact that I loved them? What a complex foamy mixture a couple is. Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn't die, it doesn't want to die.

She felt alone, she was secretly waiting for a father who wasn't showing up, she could no longer hold the confusion of that day within the limits of a game.

I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?

How wonderful to travel, how wonderful to know someone who knows everything, whose intelligence and looks and kindness are extraordinary, and who explains to you the value of what by yourself you wouldn't be able to appreciate.

Las cosas más difíciles de contar son las que nosotros mismos no llegamos a comprender." —

La belleza que Cerullo llevaba en la cabeza desde niña no ha encontrado salidas, Greco, y le ha ido a parar toda en la cara, en el pecho, en los muslos y el culo, sitios donde se pasa muy pronto y después es como si nunca la hubiese tenido".

Puoi copiarmi, farmi il ritratto preciso come fanno gli artisti, ma la mia merda resterà sempre la mia, e la tua la tua. Ah, Lenù, che ci succede a tutti quanti, siamo come i tubi quando l'acqua gela, che brutta cosa è la testa scontenta.

I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart . . . But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts . . .

Ah, there is no city that gives off so much noise and such a clamor as Naples.

My entire life would be reduced merely to a petty battle to change my social class.

el diario me provocaba un afán de verdad. Pensaba que en la escritura no tenía sentido contenerse, de ahí que escribiera

This is more or less what happened to me between the end of 1963 and the end of 1965. How easy it is to tell the story of myself without Lila: time quiets down and the important facts slide along the thread of the years like suitcases on a conveyor belt at an airport; you pick them up, put them on the page, and it's done.