407 Quotes by Elena Ferrante

While Otto ran here and there, carefully choosing places to urinate, I felt over every inch of my body the scratches of sexual abandonment, the danger of drowning in scorn for myself and nostalgia for him. I got up and went back along the path; I whistled again, and waited for Otto to return.

It wasn’t innocent blood. To my father nothing about Amalia ever seemed innocent. He, so furious, so bitter and yet so eager for pleasure, so irascible and so egotistical, couldn’t bear that she had a friendly, at times even joyful, relationship with the world. He recognized in it a trace of betrayal.

Words for being lost or for being found.

How can I explain to this woman – I thought – that from the age of six I’ve been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?

And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I’m safe?

I realized she wanted many things at the same time, and that kept her in a permanent state of dissatisfaction.

In a short while I wished I could talk every day to a boy on that level: how many mistakes I had made with him; what foolishness it had been to want him, love him, and yet always avoid him.

She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.

From the first lines I began to feel bad. In Pisa, the bad feeling increased, over days, over months. Every word of Lila’s diminished me. Every sentence, even sentences written when she was still a child, seemed to empty out mine, not the ones of that time but the ones now. And yet every page ignited my thoughts, my ideas, my pages as if until that moment I had lived in a studious but ineffectual stupor.