Quotes from Elena Ferrante

Quiero que ella esté, por eso escribo. Quiero que borre, que añada, que colabore en nuestra historia volcando en ella, según su inspiración, las cosas que sabe, que dijo o que pensó

I had the impression that, although I was absorbing much of that sight, many things, too many, were scattering around me without letting me grasp them.

They're scared. They're afraid we won't be worthy of them.

Non ho nostalgia della nostra infanzia, è piena di violenza. Ci succedeva di tutto, in casa e fuori, ma non ricordo di aver mai pensato che la vita che c'era capitata fosse particolarmente brutta. La vita era così è basta, crescevamo con l'obbligo di renderla difficile agli altri prima che gli altri la rendessero difficile a noi.

Fiz muitas coisas em minha vida, mas jamais convicta, sempre me senti um tanto descolada de minhas próprias ações.

Lei era così, rompeva equilibri solo per vedere in quali altri modi poteva ricomporli.

I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.

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. I understood suddenly why I hadn't had Nino, why Lila had had him. I wasn't capable of entrusting myself to true feelings. I didn't know how to be drawn beyond the limits. I didn't possess that emotional power that had driven Lila to do all she could to enjoy that day and that night. I stayed behind, waiting.

Uno ti può fare del male solo se vuoi bene a qualcuno. Ma io non voglio bene più a nessuno.

We were supposed to go to the sea and we hadn't gone, I had been punished for nothing. A mysterious inversion of attitudes had occurred: I, despite the rain, would have continued on the road, I felt far from everything and everyone, and distance--I discovered for the first time--extinguished in me every tie and every worry; Lila had abruptly repented of her own plan, she had given up the sea, she had wanted to return to the confines of the neighborhood. I couldn't figure it out.

She's lucky to be so loved, to love. Lucky to be adored for what she is and for what she invents. Now that she's given her brother what he wanted, now that she's taken him out of danger, surely she'll invent something else. So I don't want to lose sight of her. Something will happen.

Life can have an ironic geometry. Starting from the age of thirteen or fourteen I had aspired to a bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life, cultured and reflective. Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me. I didn't think the city could contain life forms different from those I had known as a child, violent or sensually lazy, tinged with sentimental vulgarity or obtusely fortified in defense of their own wretched degradation.

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

She, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn't afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings.

Then Pasquale himself began to be silent, defeated by Lila's capacity to link one thing to another in a chain that tightened around you on all sides.

The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.

Translation is our salvation: it draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.

Lila appeared in my life in first grade and immediately impressed me because she was very bad.

I would have the small happinesses of the unmarried girl in glasses who spends her life studying: a walk, being taken by the hand.

Mi ero accorta da tempo che ognuno si organizza la memoria come gli conviene, tuttora mi sorprendo a farlo anch'io

Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?

Ah, the violence: tearing, killing, ripping. Lila, between fascination and horror, spoke to me in a mixture of dialect, Italian, and very educated quotations that she had taken from who knows where and remembered by heart. The entire planet, she said, is a big Fosso Carbonario.

The conclusion we drew from this convinced us that it was best to do everything on purpose, deliberately, so that you would know what to expect.

I cried and cried, as if I had carelessly lost somewhere the most promising part of myself.