Quotes by Elena Ferrante

“...but I was bored, I could scarcely understand them. I started to borrow novels from the circulating library, and read one after the other. But in the long run they didn't help. They presented int...”

“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 b...”

“Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences t...”

“Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite.”

“How quickly people changed, with their interests, their feelings. Well-made phrases replaced by well-made phrases, time is a flow of words coherent only in appearance, the one who piles up the most...”

“She said that we didn't know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to understand anything, that everything in the neighbourhood, every stone or piece of wood...”

“Thus she returned to the theme of before, but in a different way than she had at first. She said that we didnt know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to ...”

“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.”

“Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.”

“...maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.”

“I simply decided once and for all to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what”

“I soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn't excite me, only what Lila touched became important.”

“Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence.”

“Up or down, it seemed to us that we were always going toward something terrible that had existed before us yet had always been waiting for us, just for us. When you haven't been in the world long, ...”

“I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was p...”

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

“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”

“To cause pain was a disease. As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the emban...”

“Don't be timid. You're a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present.”

“I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they wont. . . . I very much love those my...”