Quotes from Elena Ferrante

Religion will disappear from men's consciousness when, finally, we have constructed a world of equals, without class distinctions, and with a sound of scientific conception of society and of life

Diventare. Era un verbo che mi aveva sempre ossessionata [...]. Io volevo diventare, anche se non avevo mai saputo cosa. Ed ero diventata, questo era certo, ma senza oggetto, senza una vera passione, senza un'ambizione determinata.

My mother always saw evil where, to my great annoyance, it was sooner or later discovered that evil really was, and her crossed eye seemed made purposely to identify the secret motives of the neighborhood.

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 theorized that a woman without love for her origins is lost.

I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new.

But the happy ending has to do with the tricks of the narrative, not with life, or even love, which is an uncontrollable, changeable feeling, with nasty surprises that are alien to the happy ending.

But her body, seated a few inches from mine on the wooden bench, had manifested no unease. Not even her voice, which had been sure and clear: no. Not a single sign that might lead me to think that she was lying. Thus I had no doubt. She was lying.

If I could conceal from myself the impression that the life had been drained out of me like blood and saliva and mucus from a patient during an operation, maybe I could deceive Mario as well.

But I felt that things were taking a turn for the worse, and I was frightened. Having to stay alert in order to avoid mistakes and confront dangers had exhausted me to the point where sometimes simply the urgency of doing something made me think that I really had done it.

But when do people ever speak truthfully and when do things ever happen unexpectedly? You know better than me that it's all a fraud and one thing follows another and then another.

Ha parlato bene, ma senza pensare alle conseguenze". "Si parla bene proprio quando non si pensa alle conseguenze".

Children don't know the meaning of 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 is the night.

I let his rose wither in a vase on my desk, a vase painfully empty of flowers since the long-ago time when, on my birthday, Mario would give me a cattleya, in imitation of Swann. In the evening the flower was already black and bent on its stem. I threw it in the trash.

Would I know how to imagine those things without her? Would I know how to give life to every object, let it bend in unison with mine?

I looked at him attentively. It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn't even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.

She spoke with a different sort of determination, calmer, as if it were no longer necessary to fight to the death for every little thing.

You're really doing well, it's the satisfaction you get from school, it's love," Lila said to me, and I felt that she was a little sad.

What's got into me? Do I want children? Do I want to be a mamma, nursing and singing lullabies? Marriage plus pregnancy? And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I'm safe?

La guardavo dalla finestra, sentivo che la sua forma precedente s'era rotta e ripensavo a quel brano bellissimo della lettera, al rame crepato e accartocciato. Era un'immagine che ormai utilizzavo di continuo, ogni volta che avvertivo una frattura dentro di lei o dentro di me. Sapevo - forse speravo - che nessuna forma avrebbe mai potuto contenere Lila e che presto o tardi avrebbe spaccato tutto un'altra volta.

I gave a nervous laugh, then said, "Thanks, but at a certain point school is over." "Not for you: you're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.

I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies.

From the first lines I began to feel bad. In Pisa, the bad feeling increased, over days, over months. Every word of Lila's diminished me. Every sentence, even sentences written when she was still a child, seemed to empty out mine, not the ones of that time but the ones now. And yet every page ignited my thoughts, my ideas, my pages as if until that moment I had lived in a studious but ineffectual stupor.

every choice has its history, so many moments of our existence are shoved into a corner, waiting for an outlet, and in the end the outlet arrives.