407 Quotes by Elena Ferrante

Evocai versi e romanzi come tranquillanti. Forse, pensai, aver studiato mi serve solo a questo: a calmarmi.

As for infidelities, he said, if you don’t find out about them at the right moment they’re of no use: when you’re in love you forgive everything. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. And he went on like that, piling up painful remarks about the blindness of people in love.

I felt that there was no irony, it was a real compliment. Then she added with sudden harshness: “I don’t want to read anything else that you write.” “Why?” She thought about it. “Because it hurts me,” and she struck her forehead with her hand and burst out laughing.

But I’ve always had a low voice, I can’t yell, the words fall a short distance away like a handful of pebbles thrown by a child.

I behaved like that certainly to feel free from all the old bonds, to make it clear that I didn’t care anymore about the judgment of relatives and friends, their values, their wanting me to be consistent with what they imagined themselves to be.

Books are written so their authors can be heard, not so that they remain silent.

She was like the full moon when it crouches behind the forest and the branches scribble on its face.

We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us.

Aunt Lina said that spirits existed, but not in the places, or in the alleys, or near the ancient gates of the Vatso. They existed in people’s ears, in the eyes when eyes looked inside and not out, in the voice as soon as it begins to speak, in the head when it thinks, because words are full of ghosts but so are images. Is it true, Mamma?