Elena Ferrante quotes

Elena Ferrante is a renowned Italian novelist, famous for her Neapolitan Novels series. Her true identity remains unknown, adding to the intrigue surrounding her work. She has captivated readers worldwide with her vivid storytelling and exploration of female friendship and identity. Here are 28 of her quotes:

Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.

Elena Ferrante

He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.

Elena Ferrante

Certainly, female writing exists, but mainly because even writing is powerfully conditioned by the historical-cultural construction that is gender. That said, gender has an increasingly wide mesh, its rules have been relaxed, and it is more and more difficult to reconstruct what has influenced and formed us as writers...

Elena Ferrante

I believe that they have put a spotlight on what women have always known and have always been more or less silent about. Patriarchal domination, even - despite appearances - in the West, is still very entrenched, and each of us, in the most diverse places, in the most varied forms, suffers the humiliation of being a silent victim or a fearful accomplice or a reluctant rebel or even a diligent accuser of victims rather than of the rapists. Paradoxically, I don't feel that there are great differences between the women of the Neapolitan neighborhood whose story I told and Hollywood actresses or the educated, refined women who work at the highest levels of our socioeconomic system...

Elena Ferrante

I don't know if my writing has the energy you say it does. Of course, if that energy exists, it's because either it finds no other outlets or, consciously or not, I've refused to give it other outlets. Of course, when I write, I draw on parts of myself, of my memory, that are agitated, fragmented, that make me uncomfortable. A story, in my view, is worth writing only if its core comes from there.

Elena Ferrante

No, I never plan my stories. A detailed outline is enough for me to lose interest in the whole thing. Even a brief oral summary makes the desire to write what I have in mind vanish. I am one of those who begin to write knowing only a few essential features of the story they intend to tell. The rest they discover line by line.

Elena Ferrante

I can't say precisely. I don't think anyone really knows how a story takes shape. When it's done you try to explain how it happened, but every effort, at least in my case, is insufficient. There is a before, made up of fragments of memory, and an after, when the story begins. But before and after, I have to admit, are useful only in answering your question now in an intelligible way.

Elena Ferrante

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.

Elena Ferrante

You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.

Elena Ferrante

Later, every form of religious belief seemed absurd to me, and death was as if disfigured. [...] Today I would never say: he has gone away. I've lost the sense of the crossing over: nothing goes up to heaven, we don't move to another world, we don't return, we aren't reborn. We remain definitively immobile; death is the last point on the segment of life that has chanced to be ours.

Elena Ferrante

Nino has something that's eating him inside, like Lila, and it's a gift and a suffering; they aren't content, they never give in, they fear what is happening around them.

Elena Ferrante

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

Elena Ferrante

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.

Elena Ferrante

Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn't agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life.

Elena Ferrante

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

Elena Ferrante

Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.

Elena Ferrante

Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.

Elena Ferrante

Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.

Elena Ferrante

Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones.

Elena Ferrante

It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn't even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.

Elena Ferrante

She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.

Elena Ferrante

... maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.

Elena Ferrante