407 Quotes by Elena Ferrante

I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet.

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

I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts.

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.

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

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

Depressed I went out into the heat that lay on the neighborhood like a hand swollen with fever in that season, and made my way to the library.

There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.

Ognuno si racconta la vita come gli fa comodo.