407 Quotes by Elena Ferrante

Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.

Especially at night she was afraid of waking up and finding him formless in the bed, transformed into excrescences that burst out because of too much fluid, the flesh melted and dripping, and with it everything around, the furniture, the entire apartment and she herself, his wife, broken, sucked into that stream polluted by living matter.

But I felt that things were taking a turn for the worse, and I was frightened. Having to stay alert in order to avoid mistakes and confront dangers had exhausted me to the point where sometimes simply the urgency of doing something made me think that I really had done it.

Lies are better than tranquilizers.

In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.

He’s marrying me to have a faithful servant, that’s the reason all men get married.

Le cose brutte che non dici a nessuno diventano cani che ti mangiano la testa di notte mentre dormi.

The solitude of women’s minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it’s a waste to be separated from each other without procedures, without tradition.

Ah, the violence: tearing, killing, ripping. Lila, between fascination and horror, spoke to me in a mixture of dialect, Italian, and very educated quotations that she had taken from who knows where and remembered by heart. The entire planet, she said, is a big Fosso Carbonario.