EFElena Ferrante

56 collected words

Elena Ferrante

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.

Elena Ferrante / quote

02Undated

Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote.

Elena Ferrante / quote

03Undated

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

Elena Ferrante / quote

04Undated

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.

Elena Ferrante / quote

05Undated

...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.

Elena Ferrante / quote

06Undated

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

Elena Ferrante / quote

07Undated

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

Elena Ferrante / quote

08Undated

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 embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs.

Elena Ferrante / quote

09Undated

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.

Elena Ferrante / quote

10Undated

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 won’t. . . . I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child. . . . True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known. . . .

Elena Ferrante / quote

11Undated

She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood around her. Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn. Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away. A few evenings earlier, something had happened that had really scared her. Marcello had left, the television was off, the house was empty, Rino was out, her parents were going to bed. She was alone in the kitchen washing the dishes and was tired, really without energy, when there was an explosion. She had turned suddenly and realized that the big copper pot had exploded. Like that, by itself. It was hanging on the nail where it normally hung, but in the middle there was a large hole and the rim was lifted and twisted and the pot itself was all deformed, as if it could no longer maintain its appearance as a pot. Her mother had hurried in in her nightgown and blamed her for dropping it and ruining it. But a copper pot, even if you drop it, doesn't break and doesn't become misshapen like that. "It's this sort of thing," Lila concluded, "that frightens me. More than Marcello, more than anyone. And I feel that I have to find a solution, otherwise, everything, one thing after another, will break, everything, everything.

Elena Ferrante / quote

12Undated

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

Elena Ferrante / quote

13Undated

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

Elena Ferrante / quote

14Undated

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

Elena Ferrante / quote

15Undated

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

Elena Ferrante / quote

16Undated

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, it's hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don't even feel the need to. Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this: 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.

Elena Ferrante / quote

17Undated

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 particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.

Elena Ferrante / quote

18Undated

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

Elena Ferrante / quote

19Undated

Only when we feel the story in each of its moments or places are we able to tell it properly.

Elena Ferrante / quote

20Undated

Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor, even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.

Elena Ferrante / quote

21Undated

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?

Elena Ferrante / quote

22Undated

I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?

Elena Ferrante / quote

23Undated

When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it.

Elena Ferrante / quote

24Undated

I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart . . . But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts . . .

Elena Ferrante / quote