Quotes from Elena Ferrante

Finally he had decided that he had to free Lila, even if at that moment, perhaps, she had no desire to be freed. But—he had said to himself—it takes time for people to understand what's good and what's bad, and helping them means doing for them what in a particular moment of their life they aren't capable of doing.

I'm lying, yes, but why do you force me to give a linear explanation; linear explanations are almost always lies.

The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere.

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

It seemed that everyone was shouting too loudly and moving too quickly. This sensation was accompanied by nausea, and she had had the impression that something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around everyone and everything forever, but imperceptible, was breaking down the outlines of persons and things and revealing itself.

What a fuss for a name: famous or not, it's only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts.

I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful.

For her whole life she would sacrifice to him every quality of her own, and he wouldn't even be aware of the sacrifice, he would be surrounded by the wealth of feeling, intelligence, imagination that were hers, without knowing what to do with them, he would ruin them.

it's good to be afraid. You need to be afraid even when there's no need, it keeps you alert. The bond with known spaces, with secure affections, yielded to curiosity about what might happen. Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many.

As long as one writes only for oneself, writing is a free act by means of which, to use an oxymoron, one secretly opens oneself.

felt that if I ran away with the others I would leave with her something of mine that she would never give back.

I recognized in them what I had never had and, I now knew, would always lack. What was it? I wasn't able to say precisely: the training, perhaps, to feel that the questions of the world were deeply connected to me; the capacity to feel them as crucial and not purely as information to display at an exam; a mental conformation that didn't reduce everything to my own individual battle, to the effort to be successful.

I felt that there was no irony, it was a real compliment. Then she added with sudden harshness: "I don't want to read anything else that you write." "Why?" She thought about it. "Because it hurts me," and she struck her forehead with her hand and burst out laughing.

Love in my case is not indispensable to pleasure, nor is respect. Is it possible, therefore, that the disgust, the humiliation begin afterward, when a man subdues you and violates you at his pleasure solely because now you belong to him, love or not, respect or not?

I feel ugly, like I'm a bad person, and yet I'd like to be loved.

I had always considered sex an ultimate sticky reality, the least mediated contact possible with another body. Instead, after that experience, I was convinced that sex is an extreme product of the imagination. The greater the pleasure, the more the other is only a dream, a nocturnal reaction of belly, breasts, mouth, anus?of every isolated inch of skin?to the caresses and thrusts of a vague entity definable according to the necessities of the moment.

He said we lived in a provincial country, where every occasion was an opportunity for complaining, but meanwhile no one rolled up his sleeves and reorganized things, trying to make them function.

in his view love ended only when it was possible to return to oneself without fear or disgust

As usual it seemed to her that she could enter and leave my life without any worries, as if we were still a single thing and there was no need to ask how are you, how are things, am I disturbing you.

That connection between anxiety and ugliness unexpectedly consoled me. You can turn ugly because of worries—

One night my mother said to me: "Your father is younger than you. You're growing up and he's still a child. He'll remain a child forever, an extraordinarily intelligent child hypnotized by his games. If you don't keep an eye on him, he gets hurt. I should have understood him as a girl, but then he seemed to me a grown man.

The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.

I feel like the knight in an ancient romance as, wrapped in his shining armor, after performing a thousand astonishing feats throughout the world, he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdues and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage.

That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelesness is what most frightened her.