Quotes About Elena Ferrante

So I took my phone to a bakery and coffee shop called Some Crust and read Elena Ferrante at an outdoor table and hoped for some amusing college student to hit on me. I got hit on by amusing senior citizens instead. Perhaps they, like the Klan, had been lately emboldened.

She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in this world.

She possessed intelligence and didn't put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the world are merely a sign of vulgarity. That was the fact that must have beguiled Nino: the gratuitousness of Lila's intelligence.

that the human condition was so obviously exposed to the blind fury of chance that to trust in a God, a Jesus, the Holy Spirit—this last a completely superfluous entity, it was there only to make up a trinity, notoriously nobler than the mere binomial father-son—was the same thing as collecting trading cards while the city burns in the fires of hell.

To be born in that city is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.

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.

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.

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

Depressed I went out into the heat that lay on the neighborhood like a hand swollen with fever in that season, and made my way to the library.

Evidently what in the fiction of the story serves in all innocence to reach the heart of the reader becomes an abomination for one who feels the echo of the facts she has really lived.

The four volumes known as the "Neapolitan quartet" (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) were published by Europa Editions in English between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018.

Il giorno seguente partii per Venezia insieme a Ida. In treno ci ripromettemmo di diventare adulte come a nessuna era mai successo.

if social democracy wins, it will be capital that triumphs through the centuries and the working class will fall victim to enforced consumerism.)

Sie verstärkte die Realität, während sie sie auf Worte reduzierte, sie flößte ihr Energie ein.

But what my less easily verbalized emotions recorded under the word Caserta was a spinning nausea, vertigo, and a lack of air.

I pay attention to every system of conventions and expectations, above all literary conventions and the expectations they generate in readers. But that law-abiding side of me, sooner or later, has to face my disobedient side. And, in the end, the latter always wins.

The struggle is due to the fact that the present — the entire present — even that of the "I" who writes, letter by letter — can't maintain with clarity the thought-vision, which always comes before, is always the past, and therefore tends to be blotted out.

Yes, it was enough to pull one thread to go on playing with the mysterious figure of my mother, now enriching it, now humiliating it.