407 Quotes by Elena Ferrante

Was it Lila who had persuaded Stefano to behave in a way that was making them the most admired and most talked about couple in the neighborhood? Was this her latest invention? Did she want to leave the neighborhood by staying in the neighborhood? Did she want to drag us out of ourselves, tear off the old skin and put on a new one, suitable for what she was inventing?

One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.

Rino’s mother is named Raffaella Cerullo, but everyone has always called her Lina. Not me, I’ve never used either her first name or her last. To me, for more than sixty years, she’s been Lila. If I were to call her Lina or Raffaella, suddenly, like that, she would think our friendship was over.

That was really fun,” Pina exclaimed, but with the air of one who wants to say: You two bitches, you sent me off by myself with someone I don’t even know.

Even as a child, he said, I knew I wasn’t what the others thought but not what I thought, either. I said to myself: I’m another thing, a thing hidden in the veins, it has no name and waits.

That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelesness is what most frightened her.

It’s relaxing, I thought, I was wrong not to come sooner. I had a friend of my age with her own house, full of opulent, orderly things. That.

Today I feel some uneasiness in recalling how much I suffered, I have no sympathy for myself of that time.

So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him.