407 Quotes by Elena Ferrante

To write, you have to want something to survive you.

One night my mother said to me: “Your father is younger than you. You’re growing up and he’s still a child. He’ll remain a child forever, an extraordinarily intelligent child hypnotized by his games. If you don’t keep an eye on him, he gets hurt. I should have understood him as a girl, but then he seemed to me a grown man.

She was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being all her own, that was still obscure to her.

I didn’t know the map of prestige.

The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere.

I knew – perhaps I hoped – that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again.

I had the impression that, although I was absorbing much of that sight, many things, too many, were scattering around me without letting me grasp them.

It was predictable, of course, but now that a date had been fixed, March 12th, it was as if I had been strolling absentmindedly and banged into a door.

Gone was the pleasure of re-educating my voice, my gestures, my way of dressing and walking, as if I were competing for the prize of best disguise, the mask worn so well that it was almost a face.