Elena Ferrante quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Elena Ferrante on Wise Famous Quotes.

If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.

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

Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite. And there was nothing in her appearance that acted as a corrective.

Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones.

Because what is the face, what finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise, rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature.

We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.

That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelesness is what most frightened her.

We are flying over a ball of fire.

The fictional treatment of biographical material - a treatment that for me is essential - is full of traps.

Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.

Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.

I know I'm mean to tell you these things, but he is much worse than I am. He has the worst kind of meanness, that of superficiality.

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

We have too much stuff inside and it swells us, breaks us.

The daily standard of unlivability isn't news. So when the exceptional passes, everything is silent and everything continues to rot.

Yes, yes, resign yourself to what you are, each on his own path.

I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful.

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

I wrote my book to free myself from it, not to be its prisoner.

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.

In my spare time I didn't go out, I sat and read novels I got from the library: Grazia Deledda, Pirandello, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky.

Move on another plane in the name of one's own difference.

We told each other everything, even the little things, and were happy.

Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it.

Individuals and cities without love are a danger to themselves and to others.

Places of the imagination are visited in books. Seen in reality they may be hard to recognize; they are disappointing, they might even seem fake.

You wanted to write novels, I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality.

I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.

uncultured youths who make random pronouncements on everything

I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.

To write, you have to want something to survive you.

Apart from the machine, everything was shit. At

Maybe I should tell her that things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. It's a good sentence, she'll like it.

A book should push the reader to confront himself and the world

Nowhere is it written that you can't do it.

The laws work for those who fear them, not for those who violate them.

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.

Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.

Reason, by a weariness that made everything around

We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.

You're really a good girl, poor you.

The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand.

Is it possible that in all those years she left me nothing of herself, or, worse, that I didn't want to keep anything of her? It is. This

Not for you," Lila replies ardently, "you're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.

At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.

To carry out any project to which you attach your own name you have to love yourself.

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

Lies are better than tranquilizers.

starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.

She was like that, she threw things off balance just to see if she could put them back in some other way.

If you don't try, nothing ever changes.

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.

But I've always had a low voice, I can't yell, the words fall a short distance away like a handful of pebbles thrown by a child.

Disgust at the torments that shackle us, the chains of heavy life.

I mean that a party can't be anything other than a distributor of favors in exchange for support, ideals are part of the furniture.

I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.

Everything is interesting if you know how to work on it.

And my ego gladly avoids leaning out the window.

You can't leave me here to hope, when in reality you've already decided everything.

She went like that saint who, although she still has her head on her shoulders, is carrying it in her hands, as if it had already been cut off.

I don't want to accept an idea of life where the success of the self is measured by the success of the written page.

[I]t was as if I had been strolling absentmindedly and banged into a door.

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

Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.

the park had climbed up to

I soon discovered that I was getting used to being happy and unhappy at the same time, as if that were the new, inevitable law of my life.

The solitude of women's minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it's a waste to be separated from each other without procedures, without tradition.

I knew - perhaps I hoped - that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again.

When the task we give ourselves has the urgency of passion, there's nothing that can keep us from completing it.

So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

The disgusting face of things alone was not enough for writing a novel: without imagination it would seem not a true face but a mask.

But her husband was sleeping, he had fallen asleep as if wrapped in a magic cape.

you have to get your hands dirty if you want to change things.

How heavy a body that has been traversed by death is, life is light, there's no need to let anyone make it heavy for us

You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.

Sarratore's son is really unbearable.

There are moments when we resort to senseless formulations and advance absurd claims to hide straightforward feelings.

How difficult it was to find one's way, how difficult it was not to violate any of the incredibly detailed male regulations.

Lila shook her head skeptically. She was trying to understand, we were both trying to understand, and understanding was something that we loved to do.

Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive.

Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them.

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.

Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.

As long as one writes only for oneself, writing is a free act by means of which, to use an oxymoron, one secretly opens oneself.

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

As a girl-twelve, thirteen years old-I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me.

She deserved him because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not to hope that he would want her.

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.

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 was stunned. Fernando looked out, still screaming horrible threats at his daughter. He had thrown her like a thing.

The blood spurted from his neck and hit a copper pot hanging on the wall.

Estrangement and belonging, an effect of distance and closeness at the same time.

She was like the full moon when it crouches behind the forest and the branches scribble on its face.

Even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina.

I gave in continuously, with painful pleasure, to waves of unhappiness.

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

One writes to inflict pain on those who wish to inflict pain.

For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first.

Maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset,