Quotes from Elena Ferrante

Mentre parlava sentii con chiarezza il ridicolo della sua voce impostata, la rozzezza del suo poetizzare, il liricume dietro cui celava la smania di mettermi le mani addosso.

she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.

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.

Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.

Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.

Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.

They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.

You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.

Not for you," Lila replies ardently, "you're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.

In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.

Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me...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.

She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.

Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn't agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life.

There are people who leave and people who know how to be left.

Nowhere is it written that you can't do it.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones.

I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts.

I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.

maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.

If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.

The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women's intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn't realize it." I waited in silence

There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.