407 Quotes by Elena Ferrante

A book, an article, could make noise, but ancient warriors before the battle also made noise, and if it wasn’t accompanied by real force and immeasurable violence it was only theater.

Estrangement and belonging, an effect of distance and closeness at the same time.

The whole future – I thought – will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning.

I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.

I soon discovered that I was getting used to being happy and unhappy at the same time, as if that were the new, inevitable law of my life.

Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object.

Success depends on the capacity to manipulate the obvious with calculated precision.

Disse che la faccia schifosa delle cose non bastava a scrivere un romanzo: senza fantasia non pareva una faccia vera, ma una maschera.

Lila shook her head skeptically. She was trying to understand, we were both trying to understand, and understanding was something that we loved to do.