407 Quotes by Elena Ferrante

Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?

What I expect from a good story is that it will tell me today what I can’t know from any other source but that story, from its unique way of putting something into words, from the feeling that it implies.

Finally he had decided that he had to free Lila, even if at that moment, perhaps, she had no desire to be freed. But – he had said to himself – it takes time for people to understand what’s good and what’s bad, and helping them means doing for them what in a particular moment of their life they aren’t capable of doing.

To be born in that city is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.

She went like that saint who, although she still has her head on her shoulders, is carrying it in her hands, as if it had already been cut off.

In fiction we say and recognize things about ourselves, which, for the sake of propriety, we ignore or don’t talk about in reality.

And to keep under control the anxieties of change I had, finally, taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm, my voice held back in my throat so that I would not make a spectacle of myself.

What is clear to me, always, is that the writing must never lose sight of truth as its ultimate goal. Page after page, the drive to capture what is true, and not what resembles the truth, shapes the work. If, even for a few passages, the tone becomes false – that is, too studied, too limpid, too regimented, too well-phrased – I am obliged to stop and to figure out where I started to go wrong. If I can’t, I throw everything away.

I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness.