Elena Ferrante Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

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
The voice is part of your body, it needs your presence. You speak, you have a dialogue, you correct, you give further explanations. Writing, on the other hand, only needs a reader. It doesn't need you.

Elena Ferrante
Then there are times when nothing matters but getting the story down. That is the most joyful moment, when I know the narrative is underway, and all I have to do is make it flow better.

Elena Ferrante
A plot twist can lose substance simply because I can't keep it to myself and describe it to a friend. The oral story immediately destroys everything—however remarkable the development I had in mind, from that moment it doesn't seem worth the trouble of writing down.

Elena Ferrante
I remember the violet light of the courtyard, the smells of a warm spring evening.

Elena Ferrante
In that last year of elementary school, wealth became our obsession. We talked about it the way characters in novels talk about searching for treasure.

Elena Ferrante
In those middle school years many things changed right before our eyes, but day by day, so that they didn't seem to be real changes.

Elena Ferrante
There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

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

Elena Ferrante
Nowhere is it written that you can't do it.

Elena Ferrante