407 Quotes by Elena Ferrante

The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I waited in silence.

They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.

The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.

But when do people ever speak truthfully and when do things ever happen unexpectedly? You know better than me that it’s all a fraud and one thing follows another and then another.

Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. I did so then, and finally it seemed that I had only come up against yet another proof of how splendid and shadowy our friendship was, how long and complicated Lila’s suffering had been, how it still endured and would endure forever.

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

What have I done, she thought, dazed by wine, and what is this gold circle, this glittering zero I’ve stuck my finger in.

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

Competition between women is good only if it does not prevail; that is to say if it coexists with affinity, affection, with a real sense of being mutually indispensable, with sudden peaks of solidarity in spite of envy, jealousy and the whole inevitable cohort of bad feelings.