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Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante Quotes

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Famous Elena Ferrante Quotes

“Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs.”

“Há essa presunção em quem se sente predestinado às artes, sobretudo à literatura: trabalha-se como alguém que tivesse recebido uma investidura, mas de fato ninguém jamais nos investiu de coisa nenhuma, fomos nós que demos a nós mesmos a autorização para sermos autores, mas lamentamos quando os outros dizem: essa ninharia que você fez não me interessa, aliás, me entedia, quem lhe deu o direito.”

“It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me: the fear that, in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance. And the fact that she didn’t answer emphasized that preoccupation. However hard I tried in my letters to communicate the privilege of the days in Ischia, my river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full.”

“Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor, even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.”