407 Quotes by Elena Ferrante

It was as if she wanted to take the power away even from the realistic possibility of violent death by reducing it to words, to a form that could be controlled.

Translation is our salvation: it draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.

When I opened my eyes again, five hours later, at seven o’clock on Saturday August 4th, I had trouble getting my bearings. The hardest day of the ordeal of my abandonment was about to begin, but I didn’t know it yet.

Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life. I understood suddenly why I hadn’t had Nino, why Lila had had him. I wasn’t capable of entrusting myself to true feelings. I didn’t know how to be drawn beyond the limits. I didn’t possess that emotional power that had driven Lila to do all she could to enjoy that day and that night. I stayed behind, waiting.

And so, in spite of his virtues, he was a frivolous, superficial man, an animal organism who dripped sweat and fluids and left behind, like the residue of a careless pleasure, living material conceived, nourished, shaped within female bellies.

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

Why, then, even when I advanced, was I so quick to retreat? Why did I always have ready a gracious smile, a happy laugh, when things went badly? Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?

Maybe I should tell her that things without a meaning are the most beautiful ones.

So pleasure was this: breaking, mixing, no longer knowing what was mine and what was his.