407 Quotes by Elena Ferrante

C'entriamo sempre e soltanto noi due: lei che vuole che io dia ciò che la sua natura e le circostanze le hanno impedito di dare, io che non riesco a dare ciò che lei pretende; lei che si arrabbia per la mia insufficienza e per ripicca vuole ridurmi a niente come ha fatto con se stessa, io che ho scritto mesi e mesi e mesi per darle una forma che non si smargini, e batterla, e calmarla, e così a mia volta calmarmi.

Yes, it's Lila who makes writing difficult. My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck.

(…) when you don't know how to keep a man you lose everything, (…)

I concentrated on training myself to react little or not at all. I learned to reduce my emotions to the minimum.

We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.

...the dead are objects that have broken, a television, the radio, the mixer, and the best thing is to remember them as they were when they were working, because the only acceptable tomb is memory.

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

I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew now to be not only a man in the right way, but also a woman.

For children parents are always a burden. But parents who draw too much attention to themselves are intolerable.