Quotes from Elena Ferrante

But the condition of wife had enclosed her in a sort of glass container, like a sailboat sailing with sails unfurled in an inaccessible place, without the sea.

I began to weep with loneliness. What was I, who was I? I felt pretty again, my pimples were gone, the sun and the sea had made me slimmer, and yet the person I liked and whom I wished to be liked by showed no interest in me.

One becomes affectionate toward men slowly, whether they coincide or not with whomever in the various phases of life we have taken as the model of a man.

That year it seemed to me that I expanded like pizza dough.

the elegant jump from malicious gossip to compliment, seemed to me so very successful that I thought of adult normality precisely as an art of that type.

I'll give you treasure chests full of gold pieces, I know the value of spending time with you." I

Let's write one together," Lila said once, and that filled me with joy.

In fiction we say and recognize things about ourselves, which, for the sake of propriety, we ignore or don't talk about in reality.

Ognuno si racconta la vita come gli fa comodo.

Nelle favole si fa come si vuole e nella realtà si fa come si può.

The reasonableness of others and my own desire for tranquility got on my nerves. The breath built up in my throat, ready to vibrate with words of rage. I felt the need to quarrel, and in fact I quarreled first with our male friends, then with their wives or girlfriends, and finally I went on to clash with anyone, male or female, who tried to help me accept what was happening to my life.

I hated the idea that he knew everything about me while I knew little or nothing of him. I felt like someone who is blind and knows that he is being observed by the very people he would like to spy on in every detail.

A book, an article, could make noise, but ancient warriors before the battle also made noise, and if it wasn't accompanied by real force and immeasurable violence it was only theater.

Stava reagendo spiegandomi di fatto che non avevo vinto niente, che al mondo non c'era alcunché da vincere, che la sua vita era piena di avventure diverse e scriteriate proprio quanto la mia, e che il tempo semplicemente scivolava via senza alcun senso, ed era bello solo vedersi ogni tanto per sentire il suono folle del cervello dell'una echeggiare dentro il suono folle del cervello dell'altra.

Le cose brutte che non dici a nessuno diventano cani che ti mangiano la testa di notte mentre dormi.

I'm laughing, I apologized, at the situation, at you, who've wanted to kill Nino forever, and at me, who if he showed up now would say to you: Yes, kill him. I'm laughing out of despair, because I've never been so offended, because I feel humiliated in a way that I don't know if you can imagine, because at this moment I'm so ill that I think I'm fainting.

It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.

I, too, would find out that old age is a brute, ferocious beast.

I'm never going to fall in love with anyone and I will never ever ever write a poem.' 'I don't believe it.' 'It's true.' 'But people will fall in love with you.' 'Worse for them.

A broken clock that, because its metal heart continued to beat, was now breaking the time of everything else.

We haven't had an office open to the public for at least ten years," he answered. "And if I want to complain?" "You do it by telephone." "And if I want to spit in someone's face?" He advised me politely to try the office in Via Confienza, a hundred yards farther on.

We gazed at the constellations, praising the portentous architecture of the sky with trite formulas.

All the more reason, then, to wonder why I had confessed what was so much my own to strangers, people very different from me, who would therefore never be able to understand my reasons, and who surely, at that moment, were speaking ill of me. I couldn't bear it, I couldn't forgive myself, I felt I had been flushed out.

He's marrying me to have a faithful servant, that's the reason all men get married.