Elena Ferrante: Frasi in inglese

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

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

“Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.”

“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”

“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.”

“They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.”

“Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”

“… 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.”

“The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I waited in silence”

“Nowhere is it written that you can’t do it.”

“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.”